Webslides-remotecontrol

A websocket based solution for remote presentation

Due to the coronavirus outbreak we had to take our lessons at home. Solutions like QQ Group Screen Sharing provides poor image quality especially when playing a video, and it cannot record the sound of the video, so either the video will have no sound or the sound has to be recorded through a microphone, leading to poor audio quality.

So we chose Nodeppt as our presentation tool, but it's remote controll function was removed and can only operator on a single machine, resulting in a rough experience when sharing the presentation with up to 50 people.

So I made this.

Dependencies

"server.js" relies on "ws" to work.

npm install ws

or

yarn add ws

"remote.js" relies on "websocket-heartbeat-js" for auto reconnect.

Install

First You'll need a server to run "server.js", which simply broadcast the progress of the presentation to all connected websocket clients. You can change your port or do whatever you want in it. You also should install the only dependency "ws".

You should embed "remote.js" as a plugin to your Webslides instance like this, according to the documentation of Webslides:

WebSlides.registerPlugin("Remote",Remote);
//...before initializing Webslides instance
const ws = new WebSlides({
    loop: false
})

Look at your index.html to get some ideas. And you should change the Websocket server address in "remote.js" to match your server's. You should also embed "websocket-heartbeat-js" to your webpage for the plugin to work.

Usage

Now the presenter should visit the webslide page with a parameter "?mode=speaker", which allows the plugin to broadcast your current slide index when event "ws:slide-change" is triggered. If more than one speaker is participated, as one speaker navigate through the slides, other speakers will sync the progress of that speaker, which would be useful in the situation when a group of people are giving presentation, and want to give their parts of the presentation completly on their own without a "chairman" navigating through the slides for them.

Viewers should visit without parameters, and the plugin will listen to the broadcast and navigate to the slide where the speaker is. The plugin will not block visitor from navigating back and forth in the presentation, though.

In case you need to check the document while someone else is using it in Speaker Mode, visit the webslide page with a parameter "?mode=nocontrol", which prevents the plugin from connecting to the Websocket server, disabling remote controll.

Code quality

The code quality is absolutly poor, but I hope maybe this will be of help to those who has just decided to use Webslides and Nodeppt but wanted a smooth experience when presenting to a distributed group of viewers from everywhere around the city, and had no idea where to begin with while having to finished their presentation document in a short time, just like I had to take only 2 days using fragment time building this before our final presentation. At least it works well, especially when we show a video to our viewers, it performs way better than our previously used screen-capturing approach.