Lately I’ve been looking at new ways to webcast video with presentations.  We (ISU Extension) do this today using Windows Media Encoder – which seems to work just fine… but I would like to encode at a bit rate of about 300 Kbps at a resolution of about 600X800 and with sharper quality for digital materials such as PowerPoint slides. 

Long story short… I’ve come across a nice little device that converts VGA or DVI video into digital video via USB.  And it works surprisingly well. 

http://www.epiphan.com/ see Frame Grabbers.

The potential is …

1.  To integrate with a digital video switch which can be used in a studio for much higher quality presentation broadcasts.

2.  Use within Windows Media Encoder as a separate video source for screencasting… takes the load off the CPU and allows for the potential of switching video sources… speaker and presentation.

3.  Use with an application like Adobe Connect to get a good quality picture in picture with presentation for webcasting (works pretty well).

If you attend ACE/NETC 2007, I have a presentation “Web Conferencing by Example” and I’ll try to demonstration some examples.