[ubuntu-uk] New screencast on installing updates

[Rob Beard]

Alan Pope wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Thought I'd have another go at a screencast. This one is about installing updates as and when 
> required. It's only 7 mins long and doesn't go into massive detail, but shows the basics of 
> installing updates on Ubuntu. I added the header and footer at the start and end. I'm not 
> entirely happy with them but it will do. If someone else has more artistic skills than me (not 
> difficult) then please feel free to put together a simple slide.
>
> I've made this one available in both OGG/Theora/Vorbis and MPEG/MPEG2/MP2 format. Hopefully this 
> should mean people can play it with little or no effort on any platform. I'd be interested to 
> hear feedback from people about platforms and/or players they play on and don't play on.
>
> http://quickones.org/videos/20061108_installing_updates.ogg (10.7MB)
> http://quickones.org/videos/20061108_installing_updates.mpeg (34.4MB)
>
> I am also currently uploading the video to Google, as I believe this can help raise the 
> visibility of the team - I clearly mention ubuntu-uk and the URL is shown in the video and the 
> text accompanying the Google upload. Having it on Google makes for a very low barrier to entry 
> for Windows users to watch these, and whilst flash player is evil and closed, at least it can be 
> made to work on Ubuntu. 
>
> If anyone is in any doubt about the popularity of Google video for this kind of thing then bear 
> in mind that I uploaded all the Hampshire Linux User Group talk videos and in the 3 months 
> they've been online there's been a total of around 12000 views and 2000 downloads.
>
> These are "beginner level" at the moment. So I won't be surprised if nobody here 
> actually learns anything from them yet. Right now I'm trying to get a handle on the process to 
> make it clear and easy for others to do this. 
>
> It's a little time consuming the first time you do this, but once you have the process nailed 
> you can probably knock out a good quality 5-10 min screencast in around an hour. That includes 
> watching it a couple of times too.
>
> In case you're interested in the technical side, I used a different application this time. 
> xvidcap (available from http://xvidcap.sf.net) version 1.1.4. It records to a large number of 
> formats, but I chose MPEG2 to make it easy to edit the video and then convert to other formats 
> later.
>
> I then used avidemux to piece together the three videos (the title page, the main 
> body of the video and the end page), which was mind numbingly easy to do. 
>
> Next I used audacity to record the audio - which I did on one computer whilst I watched the 
> video on another. Of course there's no reason I couldn't have recorded the audio at the time of 
> the recording, or recorded it as I watched on one computer - not two. However as I have 
> mentioned before, I believe that recording the audio after the video gives a better result. 
> Indeed I had to record it 5 times in the end due to various mistakes/mishaps/outtakes.
>
> I then cleaned the audio up as best I could (not brilliantly, but clear enough I think), again 
> in audacity, and exported as a WAV. 
>
> Avidemux was used to mix the video and WAV audio and save as MPEG2 video (no change) and encode 
> the audio as MP2. That made the final MPEG version above.  
>
> Finally I ran ffmpeg2theora on the command line with just the MPEG video as a command line 
> parameter, to convert it to the OGG format above.
>
> Job done.
>
> Clearly the MPEG version is considerably larger than the OGG because it's not compressed as 
> heavily. I could have re-encoded it using something like DivX for the Windows viewers, which I 
> guess would probably play on many Windows clients - although not out of the box - and media 
> player won't download the DivX codec automagically as I understand it. So the compromise is a 
> heavy weight MPEG video for them, a nice lightweight OGG for us. :)
>
> Having the original in MPEG2 format should make moving these to DVD easier too.
>
> I'll write up a proper how-to once I am sure this is the best method for this kind of thing. I 
> appreciate that others might suggest different packages which may look simpler from the outset, 
> right now I think this is the best method so far. It relies only on packages that are 
> pre-compiled, and mostly (except for the ffmpeg2theora) uses GUI based applications.
>
> Cheers,
> Al
That sounds good.  I'll take a look at it tomorrow at work and show a 
couple of the non-Linux users and see what they think.

Having it available in MPEG 2 format should make it easy enough to 
convert into a DVD when we have a few of these tutorial videos.

I'm hoping to do an Ubuntu install for one of the guys at work.  I 
showed him Ubuntu on my work laptop (running the Dapper i386 Live CD) 
and he seemed impressed.  If he does go for Ubuntu on his PC then I 
could write down any questions he may have as I think a new Ubuntu user 
would be the best sort of person to come up with ideas for what could be 
screencasted.

Rob