Screencasting ideas, input required

Wed Jan 17 14:00:40 UTC 2007

On 1/17/07, Alan Pope <alan at popey.com> wrote:
>
> 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]

I like the idea of a smaller format and having it double duty as iPod
compatible is a bonus. It is so hard to understand how a person will
ultimately use a particular screencast. I'd envision having a small window
running on top of my desktop with the screencast running and the desktop or
application running such that I could follow along.

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.

Some people might want to contribute but all they can do is encoding or
re-encoding. This might be a great way to bring non-producers into the
group.

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.

This can be unpleasant indeed. Having an only latest podcast feed and a last
10 podcasts feed and an all you can eat feed might help here. My favorite
podcatcher is the famous bashpodder. It likes to re-download a multitude of
casts when a url is changed.

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.

Don't forget the world famous ubuntu documentation wiki as a place for
these.

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.

I personally find some casts helpful and others I don't watch for one reason
or another. I like to browse the list of available casts and only download
those I'm interested in. For example I don't run a local mail server so
wouldn't be interested in those screencasts but I've love to know how to
change the names of the "Application", "Places" and "System" menus so I'd
grab that cast. I know this is a little self serving and others will want
something else. Rather than a podcast of the screencasts themselves, it
makes sense to have a RSS feed with titles, descriptions and links only so
we can follow what is being produced and download only what is of interest.
There will eventually be tons of these screencasts and some of these files
can get big. Help our target audience filter what they want and need will be
a challenge. There might of necessity be tons of these options. Possibly to
the point of confusing the audience.

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?

Great job Al.

Cheers,
> Al.
>
> [0] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/iPodVideoEncoding
>
>
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>
>
>

-- 
Will Simpson
http://willsimpson.org
Moscow, Idaho
irc nick: linuxphotogeek
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