4. System Implementation And User Interface

Using the prototype for the portable meeting recorder, we have been recording meetings since January 2002, which has provided a growing collection of more than 45 meetings occupying over 25 GB of disk space. Video files are saved in the MPEG-2 format and metadata is saved in XML.

Meeting recordings and the relevant metadata are presented to the user with the Muvie Client interface shown in Figure 12. Muvie Client is a Java application that supports video editing, navigation of video using key frames, displaying and searching of the transcript, and an embedded web browser for displaying information relevant to the video. Capabilities are also provided for viewing slides, whiteboard images, meeting minutes, both the perspective and panoramic meeting video, and tracks for speaker location, as well as visual and audio activity measures. Using this interface, the user can browse a meeting by reading the description page, listening only to the speakers that he is interested in, looking at the high-motion parts, searching for keywords in the transcription, looking at the presentation slides and whiteboard images, and so on. This way, hours of meetings can be browsed in much less time. The user interface also supports editing of the video which enables the user to efficiently communicate the meeting documents with others.

Figure 12. Meeting browsing using the Muvie Client.