Dimdim demo and evaluation

Thanks for putting this together, Gus. I like that there's no desktop software to install (unlike Adobe Connect, which has a download for people who want to share their screen).

I wasn't impressed with chrishughes1's difficulties answering my questions but that doesn't necessarily reflect on DimDim's product.

Does anyone know how the DimDim-Moodle integration works?

Assuming this was Chris' first exposure to the Drupal community, he may have been overwhelmed by the amount of questions from all these strange people (alright, just you Christefano ...hehe). It was a good initial test - most people had no problem joining the meeting and there was a cross-section of people scattered around the country and world.

Feedback from the experience was generally really good. Linux support, the ability to edit videos, quality of desktop sharing, and integration were some of the issues requiring further follow up.

All in all, we think Dimdim provides pretty much everything we're looking for in terms of our immediate Dojo needs. Any sort of integration might provide for a good set of Dojo and/or DROP lessons, sessions, and tasks.

I think we've run out of excuses to NOT fire up the Dojo. I think this is going to be fun!

Thanks again to Chris and those that were able to help evaluate!

Gus Austin

Hello All,

We have now been using dimdim for our classes here at Polytechnic Insititute of NYU, Brooklyn, U.S.A. for a semester now and I wanted to share my experience with you all. Dimdim does offer all the advantages stated above with the best one being there is no need to install anything and that it is browser based. We have been using dimdim in about the most testing scenario tha you can imagine.

Our Organizational Behavior class meets in a classroom and the professor has an assistant pull up relevant material on the screen for all the class to see. At the same time, we transmit it all to our remote students via dimdim. We use lapel mic for the professor, an omnidirectional mic for the classroom and route the audio through a mixer to dimdim. We also have a webcam on looking at the classroom. Our sessions go on for anywhere between 2:00 to 2:45 hours.

Dimdim integration:
When a dimdim room is created, a URL specific to that room is available, we have 'integrated' dimdim into our course pages by placing a link with this URL. The participant can follow the the link and join the room as long as a session is on.

Some issues:
1) Audio from participants: Dimdim allows only 3 participants at a time to speak back, this makes it difficult for the moderator to shuffle the mics between the participants.
2) There is no audio cue for 'hand raised'. "Hands raised" is a typical feature where the participants notify the moderator by some blinking icon to communicate the desire to participate.
3) The audio talk back has considerable lag. That being said Dimdim provides exceptional audio quality!

As you will see these issues should not really matter much to someone who is not using it in conditions like ours. On the whole we have been very very happy with dimdim and realise that we are streching dimdim but still getting good results.

I would be happy to answer any questions or help set up dimdim sessions.

Why not use dimdim just for presentation, video etc. and user an extern sound tool. Another positive expect is that it will be easier to record a extra application (like teamspeak)

There are even some opensource projects(for example Mumble) which provides a much better sound quality and a ACL System, so only the presentator can speak in a "presentation" channel.

We ended up jumping on Dimdim for our Dojo site planning session. A few notes from the experience:

Overall quality was good; lots of crazy lag/echo when somebody isn't wearing a headset (so, duh... we should all wear headsets); easy record of the session is great, but there are a few issues that don't yet make it ideal - 1) if multiple people are speaking, only the meeting host will be recorded; 2) no easy way to edit the video; 3) links in the chat are broken and don't show up in the transcripts (decode failed) - http://recordings.dimdim.com/chat/f5176792-02fc-102c-a126-003048944478

Once these issues are resolved, we have a pretty slick and easy solution!

Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions

Hi,

I found your posts while searching for DimDim and Drupal.

My organization created a Drupal Widget that integrates with DimDim. We call it the "Drupal Rec Room". DimDim is launched with a push of a button. No sign in or account creation is necessary. The widget also includes Drupal Blogs, News, and Events.

Please try it out and tell me what you think. I plan to submit it to Drupal.org. I hope it makes the front page!

Ray

ECMINSTITUTE.org
ECMHUB.com

Here is the link:
http://ecminstitute.appspot.com/html/widget/drupalrecroom.html

The Drupal Dojo is very close to securing their own Dimdim pro account. It would be great if we could create a similar widget to the 'Drupal Rec Room'. Possibly we could schedule a Dojo workshop (using Dimdim of course) and you can demo how you built that.

Very cool!

Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions

http://forums.dimdim.com/forum/showthread.php?t=41

This seemsto be a known issue, I am using kubuntu here. In my case, the voice sounds very low pitched

Appparently its from windows (host) to linux (participant) only, if anyone has the same issue pls reply to this comment :)

Dimdim just launched a new version with some additional features -
http://www.dimdim.com/products/dimdim_new.html

Once Josh gets our Dojo pro version set up, possibly we can arrange another personalized demo in which we can provide more feedback and go over some of the issues we're having. In the meantime, keep the feedback and feature requests coming.

Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions

Quick bugs I've found on initial evaluation:

• Doesn't work in Linux.
• If not using headset, people hear 'ticking' sound.
• As the main presenter, if I switch on another presenter, I lose their audio.

Aaron Winborn
Drupal Multimedia (book, in October!)
AaronWinborn.com (blog)
Advomatic (work)

Also, I haven't yet found the 'main chat' screen shown in their demo.

Aaron Winborn
Drupal Multimedia (book, in October!)
AaronWinborn.com (blog)
Advomatic (work)

Public chat was set to 'off' - No Linux support ATM - we'll be sure to log any issues with sharing, recording, and quality that come up during Dojo sessions.

Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions

At Vordude's request I'll post my experience. I tried to join the web conference twice and both times had my browser crash. The first time I connected my browser crashed within the first minute. The second attempt went a big longer (3-4 minutes), but as soon as I opened new tabs and started working in them it crashed again. I'm not sure the crashing had anything to do with me working in the other tabs, but I thought it warranted a mention.

My browser information follows:
Firefox 3.0.5

I also have the following add-ons installed:
DrupalForFirebug 0.0.4
Firebug 1.2.1
FireGestures 1.1.3
Live HTTP Headers 0.14
Selenium IDE 1.0b2
User Agent Switcher 0.6.11
Web Developer 1.1.6
YSlow 0.9.5b2
Zend Studio Toolbar 2.1

Did anyone else have a similar experience?

Had some strange issues on January 13th. Could only hear 1 presenter, and nothing from the other. Watching the chat, I was not the only one with this issue. Are there differen't "types" of users? it seems some were okay, while others were not.

I saw two "boxes" for the people who were I guess sharing their screen, but I saw no video in either box. There were audio settings for "arthur" and "drupaldojo" (and they were at resonable levels) (and not muted) (I did see a camera through the "desktop sharing" only)

I did find an audio settings slider for gusaus (in the upper left corner) where all participants are listed.

I clicked on All Participants, to see if there were audio settings that were hidden from the main window, and that new "window" popped up in front of the screen sharing that was going on, and dimdim was having problems, determining what wanted to be "in focus" It really caused the ui to fall apart. (until I closed that new "window")

I clicked on "Full Screen" accidentally, (in the upper right corner) and my browser crashed.

The desktop sharing worked fine. (as far as I could tell)

Based on only this experience, I'm not convinced DimDim is all that great.
It is an answer, but so far I've seen issues are very similiar to the problems the dojo is used to.

I'm hopeful for change. And I've seen it work in the past better than this. Maybe multiple presenters was a bad Idea... I don't know.

(Max OSX 10.4 Firefox 3, Flash 9 (I think--when my browser crashed, I updated it to the latest, came back, and the session had finished...) )

Good news is they seem to have fixed the low pitch sound that i was having the other time, because the last session went flawlessly for me, as an attendee.

Today I finally got around to testing the system, in hope to do a session in the future, but I quickly realized that you can't share your screen if you are under linux (ubuntu in my case). This is a major disappointment, and I hope they fix it asap!

For whatever reason, I've been unable to share the screen on my Mac - always get this message -
"Computer Screen Share Error Connection Failed - Could not establish connection to server." - I went ahead and posted to this thread - http://forums.dimdim.com/forum/showthread.php?t=648

Also would be nice if the raw video was in a format a bit more conducive to editing such as .mov.

Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions