[ubuntu-uk] Screencasting was: for those unsure how to get on to irc..

Alan Pope alan at popey.com
Tue Oct 31 15:30:43 GMT 2006


On Tue, Oct 31, 2006 at 10:43:17AM +0000, David Morley wrote:
> for those unsure how to get on to irc here is a short how-to
> www.davmor2.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/gaimopen.html
> 

Alternatively you can watch a video about it :)

"I made this"

http://quickones.org/videos/20061031_xchat.ogg

It's 5 mins long and 9.8MiB in size and is in the lovely open OGG format so
should play on any Linux box. If you have a windows machine you want to play
it on then I'd suggest one of the following:-

a) Install Linux
or
b) Install the directshow filters [0] 

Here's what I did to make the video.

* Installed recordmydesktop, audacity and qemu 
* Created a disk image and installed ubuntu into it under qemu
* Did all necessary updates to the virtual machine but that's all - so it's
a basic install.
* Make a backup of the qemu disk image.
* Start qemu, practice run through of what I plan to record a few times -
this included installing and removing the software I planned to demo a few
times. 
* I also created a new user in the virtual machine under ubuntu so that
it would be "clean" and thus would be illustrative of a real session a
typical new user would experience.
* Run xwininfo to find out the xwindows window-id of the qemu window
* Run recordmydesktop specifying the option to NOT record audio.
* Switch to the qemu session, do the demo, when finished, kill
recordmydesktop.
* Play back the ogg to make sure it's okay and think about what I'll say
during the video.
* Run audacity and record myself talking whilst watching the video. I ended
up doing this a few times
* Mix the audio and video together using a script I found on the Fedora Wiki
[1]. It didn't work for gstreamer 0.10, being designed for gstreamer 0.8.
However the guys in #gstreamer (appropriately) on IRC helped me modify it. I
have put it online [2]. It takes 3 arguments - the wav audio, the ogg video
and an output file. After some CPU mashing you get a video with the audio
mixed in. It also compresses the video better than the default setting of
recordmydesktop so the result is a nice small video which is still watchable.
* Watch it, put it online.

Things it needs:-

* Better quality (and louder) audio.
* A header and footer slide to introduce the video and show contact details.
* Modification to the oggmix.sh script to automatically add the header/footer.

What else? Comments very welcome.

Cheers,
Al.

[0] - http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/
[1] - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ScreenCasting
[2] - http://bishop.popey.com/temp/oggmix.sh



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