To build a simple ScreenCast Content Viewer Software

Company Name: Progia LLC
Country: USA
Project Sector: IT
Required Skills: JAVA
Name: Mahendra S Pratap
Designation: Senior Partner

Project Summary:

Market Need
Screencasts are digital recordings of a computer screen, and can include elements such as audio narration, slide presentations or other media. Screencasts are a cost-effective way of providing engaging videos to train end users and customers on the Internet.

Despite a host of tools and vendors in this market segment, one essential tool for the producers seems to be missing. If the screencast producers are to utilize multiple sources of content during recording of the lesson (for example, presenting a variety of OER documents, audio and video media etc), they need a tool to organize and present the material seamlessly during the presentation. This is specially true if they do not want to take the extra step of editing the screencast and inserting additional material off-line (which is both costly and requires special skill).

Description of the Product

Ideally, we will have a 'universal viewer' that can host and display office documents (PowerPoint slides, MS Word, pdf files), Images (jpeg, gif, png), audio (mp3, real or quicktime) and video (flash or mp4). The documents can be present on the user's desktop or they can be located on the Internet.
A planned set of documents (arranged, for example, as a playlist) can be opened in the viewer window as and when needed during the recording. This window is set as the target for recording the screencast. The producer can then focus on the presentation itself rather than looking for each document, opening it with its own viewer and making it as the target of recording. The result will be a seamless screencast without the need of further editing or other steps.

What the Students will do?
The students will first understand and refine what this software should do from the user's perspective. They will research the existence of similar software as a commercial product and as a “open source” project. They will propose an elegant solution for the problem. They will then build and test a prototype for the same.

Duration: 1 month
Budget: $10
Number of Interns: 2