Video tutorial viewer

[Sebastian Heinlein]

Hi,

taking a look at Novell's latest distribution I saw a nice feature that
I would like to see in Ubuntu too: a video tutorial viewer that could be
started by clicking on a "Quick tour" button placed on the desktop.

My idea would be to provide an infrastructure and a central website to
fetch tutorials (e.g. extend ubuntuvideos.com). We would not be limited
to a simple Ubuntu introduction: Possible use cases could be an advanced
gimp tutorial (e.g. removing red eyes from your photos) or an
introduction to the GTK/GNOME widgets.
 
So I hooked up some already existing tools to create an Open Source
video tutorial viewer:

* istanbul could be used to record desktop session to Ogg/Vorbis
(istanbul is currently broken on edgy, so I could no give it a try, but
the old gif based version worked like a charm)

* using gstreamer to playback the video. So we would get support for a
huge variety of video formats and online tutorials without any
additional efforts.

* using gstreamer to display subtitles (this seems to be broken too at
the moment)

* store the tutorial information in .desktop files. Subtitles for
different languages could be specified by the "Subtitle[LANGCODE]"
property.

You can find a first prototype in my bzr repository:

bzr branch http://bzr.glatzor.de/tutor/sebi/

and run "python tutor.py"

If there is interest in such an application and in providing content, I
will continue developing.

Cheers,

Sebastian

P.S. By the way the playback start is a little bit choppy at the moment,
but hey, it is only a prototype