Screencasting ideas, input required

[Alan Pope]

A few ideas I have in my head about the screencast project that I would
like to open up for discussion.

* "iPod format" version. At the moment we have a mishmash of formats
available including OGG, MPEG and so on. Would it be prudent to have
videos available at 320x240 or 640x480 using the necessary codecs which
the iPod can handle? [0] 

Downside is it's not a totally straightforward process, but it doesn't
seem too painful if you don't mind compiling ffmpeg (I don't). I would
have no problem taking the master MPEGs from people submitting
screencasts and doing the re-encoding myself. I have a few fairly beefy
machines I can farm the re-encoding out to. Clearly if I became the
bottleneck then others might want to encode themselves. I would also
outline the procedure on the wiki so that people could do it for
themselves if they choose.

Of course then the question comes - how far do we go, do we make a
160x120 version for mobile phones etc. This all leads onto my second
suggestion:-

* "Podcast delivery" - an RSS feed with each new video being a separate
article containing exactly one enclosure. Multiple feeds could be
provided, one per language, per format, per screencast. These could then
be submitted to popular podcast delivery systems (such as iTunes) so
that people can get the latest content along with their favorite
podcasts. 

The site runs on Drupal and so already supports podcasting URLs. We
would probably need to wait until we had a more permanent home for this
project, because if we changed the url to the files mid way through the
project then some peoples podcatchers (clients) may re-download the
content. For large videos this would not be pleasant for the users.

An alternative or additional delivery method might be:-

* "Packaged delivery". That is, put the videos inside packages and stick
them in a repository (official or not) which allows people to
apt-get/synaptic install the videos. As new ones come out, they can
download them automatically with their updates. Would of course make
sense for people to limit what they download using meta packages.

Could we have multiple meta-packages, screencast would give you all of
them, screencasts-ubuntu would give only those that use ubuntu,
screencasts-en would be only the English ones, screencasts-ubuntu-en for
English language screencasts that use Ubuntu, screencasts-kubuntu-fr for
French language screencasts made in Kubuntu and so on. We could even
have separate packages for the different formats? Or should the packages
*only* contain OGGs? (I suspect that might be preferable given we know
they will play on Ubuntu out of the box).

Personally I like the idea of podcast (vodcast [bleargh!]) delivery and
would like to see our site have a more easy to select format. "Click
here for OGG, here for MP4, here for iPod format etc) in the same way
ubuntuclips have.

Having packaged screencasts also means we can get them out to people via
the mirrors, reducing the load on our screencast server.

Hope that all makes sense, and some of it might seem interesting/useful.
What do we think?

Cheers,
Al.

[0] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/iPodVideoEncoding
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