After a very log hiatus I’m getting back into doing screencasting. It’s been far too long, and the restart has been at least in part been prompted by a bug report and the encouragement of a couple of great women in the Ubuntu community.
The first one I’ve done is very simple and just covers the Ubuntu Live CD Boot Screen. It’s mainly just a test video to make sure the whole workflow is right and the tools work.
It’s only 10 minutes long and was recorded using recordmydesktop recording a VirtualBox window running an Ubuntu 9.04 Live CD. The audio was taken from a Plantronics iAudio 550 USB headset and recorded at the same time as the video (which is a break from what I used to do – recording audio after the video). Here’s the command line I used to record:-
$ recordmydesktop --width 640 --height 480 -x 200 -y 200 --full-shots --fps 15 --channels 1 --device hw:2,0 -v_quality 63 -s_quality 10 -v_bitrate 2000000 --delay 10
Note that I’m using the audio device “hw:2,0″ because my PC has 3 audio devices, and that happens to be the headset. The “2″ I discovered by looking at /proc/asound/cards and finding:-
alan@wopr64:~$ cat /proc/asound/cards
0 [XFi ]: SB-XFi - Creative X-Fi
Creative X-Fi 20K1 Unknown
1 [Q9000 ]: USB-Audio - QuickCam Pro 9000
Logitech, Inc. QuickCam Pro 9000 at usb-0000:00:0b.1-4, high speed
2 [Headset ]: USB-Audio - Plantronics Headset
Plantronics Plantronics Headset at usb-0000:00:0b.0-3, full speed
Once recorded I watched the resulting ogv file back in totem and then started uploading via scp to the Ubuntu Screencasts site (kindly hosted by Canonical), and to the Ubuntu Screencasts Blip.tv account. Blip.tv are cool. They save me the effort of doing any transcoding (something that used to take ages) and also host the ogv, flv and mp4 versions of the video.
I have uploaded to both because I don’t believe we should rely 100% on third party sites such as blip.tv. Even though they are pretty awesome, I’d rather we had a fallback. So if you go to the page for the screencast you’ll see the ogv comes from the Canonical hosting. Hopefully this will allay some peoples fears about stuff being hosted elsewhere.
Once uploaded I crafted a page in Drupal on the screencast site, checked it and published. It appears on the front page of the site, and is syndicated to Planet Ubuntu. The feed from blip.tv also goes through FeedBurner to Miro Guide, so those people using Miro will also get the content.
I have also (just) added the feed to iTunes. It won’t show up yet because I only just added it as I typed this blog post and they take a while to review new feeds. I appreciate that many people hate Apple and all that they stand for, the fact is iTunes has a massive reach. My goal from the very beginning of this was to reach as many people as possible – hence the videos being available in multiple formats. On the podcast we get around 50% of all our downloads via iTunes. That’s not an audience to be passed up! Plus I always make every video available in free formats via plain old http, and licensed under CC-BY-SA which I think is fair.
I had a few issues getting this all working, which isn’t helped by my desktop running Ubuntu Karmic (9.10) – the development release, not finished yet. However I think I have the workflow much better than I did previously and think I can churn out screencasts much quicker now.
The videos are on the site in 3 formats Ogg, M4V and FLV. With the advent of the HTML 5 video tag it’s possible (for users with supporting browsers) to watch the Ogg video version directly on the site. The experience should also work for ‘legacy’ (heh) browsers as the M4V and FLV versions are there too so it should degrade nicely. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to close bug 237995 too.
Questions, comments and requests welcome!
10 Comments
I think I got the same headset:
$ cat /proc/asound/cards
0 [Intel ]: HDA-Intel – HDA Intel
HDA Intel at 0xf8400000 irq 20
1 [Audio ]: USB-Audio – Plantronics Wireless Audio
Plantronics Wireless Audio Plantronics Wireless Audio at usb-0000:00:1a.0-1, fu
Didnt learn much though, already done all this before
The number of times I’ve seen that boot screen and never paid much notice to the options, now I know…. whats next?
Good question. I’d like to cover the installation in some detail, especially around partitioning as that seems to be where a lot of people have a gap in their knowledge. Also some troubleshooting videos would be good, to help people get past issues.
That would be good… I generally just wipe the entire disk, but can see the need to dual boot where I am trying to encourage people to give it ago so to speak. Maybe something on apt-get would be useful… some of the people I have convinced to give ‘it a go’ have a hard getting their head round the fact they don’t have to go searching the web for stuff to download
Yes, apt/synaptic and the whole ‘repository’ thing is quite a leap for many people. We get people in #ubuntu-uk asking for support with applications they are trying to compile, when in fact they exist in the repository!
Nice job, and welcome back to screencasting! It’s an excellent community resource.
One suggestion I’d make is to talk slightly slower – on a few occasions you talk rather fast. Talking at a more measured speed will make it easier for non-native English speakers to follow along. That’s just a small suggestion, the audio (which must be incredibly difficult to get right) is extremely clear, so hat’s off.
Yeah, that’s a fair comment. I actually had a stopwatch running on the screen and I think that may have contributed to my accelerated speed. I originally wanted it to be no more than 5 mins (attention span being somewhat limited for many people) but found a surprising amount to say about the boot screen!
I’ll try to moderate my speech for future ones. Thanks Matthew.
Hi,
It’s great to hear that your coming back with your screencasts
Iam actually a screencaster myself and responsible for the german spoken “Ubuntu Switcher” Podcast. (link: Ubuntu Switcher )
I almost record the screen like you but record audio seperately, because somehow recordmydesktop creates some audio laggs, when recording audio and video. Ah and btw. there is a nice parameter for recordmydesktop, that prevents it from blocking drag and drop actions.
Its the –no-frame switch.
The hotkeys Crtl+Alt+P for Pause recording and Ctrl+Alt+S for Stop also are very handy.
Good luck with your screencasts
Thanks for the tips, much appreciated. I too found recordmydesktop to suffer from audio lag, but it only seems to occur in longer videos. If I can keep the videos under 10 minutes then I should be okay. Of course that’s just working around the issue. There is clearly a bug somewhere.
I used to get the same issue with XVidcap and I think it was due to the video encoder dropping frames, but the audio encoder not. So the audio would get ‘ahead’ of the video because the video was not running at the full frame rate. Perhaps this is the same issue recordmydesktop has?
Thank you for the tip about the “–no-frame” switch.
I was trying to make a screencast showing how to install a browser bookmarklet and was having a problem because the drag-and-drop wasn’t working. Using “recordmydesktop –no-frame” fixed the issue.
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