Rick Block sent me a copy of the ASPO-USA DVD set to review. The APSO-USA DVD set is a set of 12 DVD's. It costs $85.00, including shipping and handling.

The presentations were professionally recorded. Besides the talks themselves, the DVD's include the presentation slides integrated at the appropriate time they are being discussed. For Thursday's and Friday's sessions, the recordings cover everything, including responses to questions from the audience, luncheon speeches, and the optional evening sessions. One set of Saturday speakers (on investment topics) is also recorded. The disks are labeled well, and each disk has a menu of talks on it.

I think the DVDs are most helpful on talks without slides and on talks where slides are only used to make a few bullet points. For these talks, the DVD is a good substitute for being at the conference. On talks that reference a lot of detail in the slides, it is sometimes difficult to read the smaller print. For these talks, I found it helpful to look at the PDF version of the presentation slides. These are free.

I understand that for the Houston conference, the slides shown on the DVDs are screenshots, which is why the resolution is not as good as on the PDFs. For the 2006 Boston conference, the PDF versions were inserted in the DVD's, so the resolution was much better.

Some recognizable speakers that would be known to TOD participants include Matt Simmons, Robert Hirsch, Chris Skrebowski, Jeremy Gilbert, David Hughes, Tom Whipple, Roger Bezdek, David Rutledge and TOD guest posters Jeffrey Brown (Westexas) and Alan Drake. One talk I particularly found interesting was by Vince Matthews of the Colorado Geological Survey. He gave a very wide ranging talk relating to the rising demand and diminished supply of many types of minerals. The full agenda can be found here.

Stuart Staniford and Euan Mearns made presentations at the conference, but they are not recorded on the DVDs. Their presentations were on Wednesday afternoon, when there were two tracks of sessions. These multiple track sessions were not recorded, due logistic issues and budgetary constraints, I was told. A PDF version of Stuart's presentation can be found here. A PDF version of Euan's presentation can be found here.

ASPO 6 Conference in Cork Ireland

I have not personally seen these DVD's. These can be ordered at this site. The DVDs are more expensive, €125.00 plus shipping and handling (€10.00 to the US). There are five DVDs in the set. According to the web site

A professional quality recording of the full conference has been made (16 hours) along with a number of personal interviews by Chris Vernon of The Oil Drum: Europe with speakers at the conference. Interviewees include Lord Ron Oxburgh, Jeremy Leggett, Minister Eamon Ryan, Jeff Rubin, Jeremy Gilbert.

Besides Chris Vernon, the other member of The Oil Drum staff on the ASPO 6 presentations is Nate Hagens. Slideshow presentations from the ASPO 6 conference are available for download without charge here.