Purpose: Playing back recorded lectures on handheld devices offers interesting perspectives for learning, but suffers from small screen sizes. The purpose of this paper is to propose several semi-automatic post-processing steps in order to improve usability by providing a better readability and additional navigation functionality. Design/methodology/approach: Several rather simple (and thus fast) statistical indicators were implemented and evaluated to detect certain events in a lecture recording that can be used in a semi-automatic post-processing approach. Findings: The evaluations verify the quality of the analysis. By presenting an actual implementation, the paper demonstrates how these results can be used to improve visibility of the content and provide further navigation options, thus increasing overall usability. Originality/value: This paper provides practical information on how to build a useful system for everyday usage in normal teaching scenarios. The paper presents different approaches illustrating initial steps for achieving better visualization and navigation functionality for lecture podcast--two issues that are essential for their usability but have not found much attention so far. This implementation demonstrates the usefulness and feasibility of the proposed techniques. Although the purpose of this article is rather on practical aspects than on presenting new research results, some of the observations can have implications for research in this area and some results illustrate important aspects and interesting research opportunities.