ubuntu-doc Digest, Vol 28, Issue 23

[Tom Howard]

------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2007 11:21:04 +0000
> From: Alan Pope <alan at popey.com>
> Subject: Screencasting ideas, input required
> To: ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com
> Message-ID: <1169032864.4612.152.camel at wopr>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> 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.
>
>

I think there should be some obvious 'click here' that links to the OGG
format for those who are new to ubuntu.  Reason being that if Granny Frigit
just had her grandson install Ubuntu on her desktop, she's not going to know
which format to click on.  Granny would have no idea what OGG, MP4, etc..
are.  I put Ububuntu on the computers of a few friends, I'll link them over
to the site and see what they think and if they can figure it out.

-Tom Howard
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