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W
wrsanim8r
Participant
July 30, 2013
Question

Cursor location & action tracking data

  • July 30, 2013
  • 1 reply
  • 7026 views

I've asked this same question in another forum, but I am still unable to locate the answer that I am looking for. Basically I am wanting to extract the cursor location information that Adobe Connect uses to properly display a presenter's mouse movements during the playback of a recorded session. If I download a local ZIP file of a recording and examine all of the XML files, none of them seem to relate to the mouse's location over time. I've even looked at all of the metadata that is embedded into each of the FLV files. No such luck there either.

I know this data is being saved because the cursor actions are overlaid/replayed during a server-side playback of a recording, but it does not get included in the XML files of the ZIP when downloading a local copy. Does anyone have a thought as to where I can pull this data? I have nearly 50 recording sessions that I need to access this data for.

Thanks for any help!
-Bill

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

J
Adobe Employee
jay1648
Adobe Employee
July 31, 2013

Bill, There can be 2 type of cursor data -

First one is those that are stored while Presenter is sharing his computer screen in a share pod and using his cursor to click on things on his own screen.

Second type of cusror data would be those that are stored when Presenter is sharing a PPT/PDF etc in a share pod and has enabled pointer, which causes Presenter's cursor to show up as Green pointer over the share pod.

The first type of cursor data is not stored in an XML file. It is encoded within the FLV file named screenshare_x_x.flv in Connect 9.

The second type of cursor movement (or pointer movement) data is stored in respective ftcontent.xml file. It can however be tricky sometimes to figure out the correct ftcontent.xml file, especially if there are more than one share pod in the recording.

I may be able to help locate it if you can point me to any specific recording you have.

Thanks,

Jaydeep

W
wrsanim8rAuthor
Participant
July 31, 2013

Jaydeep-

Thanks for the clarification on the types of cursor data. In my particular instance, I am interested in the first method that you described.

With the work that we do for our recordings, we have already worked out a process for extracting the necessary mouse data from the XML files based on the second method that you described.

During my testing, I recorded a very simple screen share where I move the cursor to each corner of my screen and clicked in each corner, and then moved to the center and clicked. I was hoping to be able to use this recording to decifer the mouse actions, in particular the mouse clicks, and generate a text file that had a time stamp for each click. If that data is somehow stored within the screenshare_x_x.flv, I guess I am asking for a method to extract that data from the FLV. Any thoughts on how I might go about that?

I appreciate any further help you might be able to provide.

The URL for the demo recording that I set up is:  http://ibmstg.adobeconnect.com/p57wu7mx0xb/

Thanks again!

-Bill

J
Adobe Employee
jay1648
Adobe Employee
August 1, 2013

Hi Bill,

The data you're looking for in this case is buried inside the FLV file. Here's a small utility that you can use to extract it : https://my.adobeconnect.com/p4rl7btx8iz/

Download the zip file using the link and unzip it. It'll have an executable named ExtractCursorPos.exe.  You can run it as follows :

ExtractCursorPos.exe {file-name}

Replace {file-name} with the name of the screenshare FLV file and this will output the cursor position in following format :

Timestamp(in millisecond), xPos, yPos, cursorType, mouseDown

Timestamp(in millisecond) = This is the times in millisecond for which the cursor position is recorded

xPos = This is the X coordinate of the current cursor position.

yPos = This is the Y coordinate of the current cursor position.

mouseDown = This is a value in either 0 or 1, where 1 indicates that the mouse was pressed down.

Hope this helps !

- Jaydeep

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