If you have any Windows machines (desktops as well as laptops) then maybe you want to take this for a test drive. Click the image above to join the beta and get the software for free.

Note: I may get a reward if enough people sign up. If you know other people who run Windows, then you too can get rewards if you refer them!

                          

One reason I like blip.tv is that they will take the Ogg Theora/Vorbis video I create in RecordMyDesktop and edit in Pitivi, and transcode it to FLV and MP4 (H264/AAC). The FLV is for streaming to a flash based player. The MP4 version is used in the iTunes feed. They also feed directly to our YouTube channel for maximum reach.

I also use the flash stream and mp4 video to supplement the Ogg video on the site. So visitors with browsers that support the video tag such as Firefox 3.5 will see the Ogg video embedded, users of ‘lesser’ browsers will either get the MP4 stream or the Flash one. I have tested this in Safari for example which shows the fallback MP4 video using the Quicktime plugin. On Windows in IE I get the Flash based player. Here’s the code I use:-

<div id="UbuntuPartitioning">
<video id="UbuntuPartitioning" controls="controls" width="640" height="480">
<source src="http://static.screencasts.ubuntu.com/2009/09/03/Ubuntu_Partitioning.ogv" type="video/ogg" />
<source src="http://blip.tv/file/get/Ubuntuscreencasts-UbuntuPartitioning718.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
<embed src="http://blip.tv/play/ge9BgZzwZgA" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="968" height="544" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed>
</video></div>

You can see this in action here at http://screencasts.ubuntu.com/2009/09/03/Ubuntu_Partitioning.

One problem I have though is that sometimes the blip.tv automagic video conversion fails. I have a ‘pro’ account with blip.tv so that lets me retry the processing, but it almost always fails on a retry so that’s a kind of pointless feature for me. The conversion that fails is the MP4 one, so that means the iTunes feed doesn’t get populated, and I can’t embed an MP4 video into the site for (for example) Safari users.

It dawned on me this morning whilst looking at the YouTube page that they also convert to MP4 (H264/AAC). So I downloaded the MP4 from YouTube and uploaded it to blip.tv as an ‘alternate’ format to an existing movie. It worked.

I tested the MP4 in Safari on the Mac, and sure enough the quicktime plugin loaded. I also checked that it would download and play in iTunes however it won’t even sync to my iPod. I guess iTunes decides it’s in a format my iPod won’t play. The videos that previously did convert okay at blip.tv do work on the iPod, so I assume there’s some resolution/codec issue in the YouTube converted ones.

Now, dear blip.tv, please fix your own transcoder, or allow me as a user to ‘pull’ MP4 video out of my YouTube account, back into my blip account. This ‘download from YouTube, upload to blip’ process works for me, but it’s time consuming and unnecessary.

                          

recordmydesktop --width 1024 --height 768 --full-shots --fps 15 --channels 1 --device hw:2,0 -v_quality 63 -s_quality 10 -v_bitrate 2000000 --no-frame --no-cursor --delay 10 --no-wm-check

As usual I had a VirtualBox window up, which had been booted off of an Ubuntu ISO image, with the first hard disk image being a Windows XP install I use sometimes for work. The aim was to show the Ubuntu install process, and how easy it is to use in no more than 10 minutes. Of course it’s not possible to go into detail about encryption, mirroring, partitioning and so on in 10 mins, so I didn’t. I stick to clicking the defaults basically, which under normal circumstances most users should expect to work. I will make further screencasts later about all the other subtleties of installing, but for now the basics.

Once the 20 mins of video was created – with long pauses in between – I opened up various video editors (see the update on my last post for more on that) and attempted to do something very simple – cut a chunk out of the ogv created by recordmydesktop. Most editors either failed to load the file or crashed in one way or another. I’m not complaining about those editors because I know for certain scenarios they probably all work fine, but not for what I specifically wanted. For example I know avidemux is great at chopping up an MPEG2 video, Kino is great for managing DV from a video camera, and Kdenlive and Blender are great for editing video from a camera.

However the only editor (of those that I tried) that would load the video and even play it sensibly – with me scrubbing back and forth without it crashing out, was Pitivi. Using version 0.13.2.2 from the Ubuntu Karmic (9.10 to be) repository I was able to cut small pieces of silence from my video in a fairly sensible way. It goes something like this:-

Watch the video or scrub forward to a point where I need to cut. Note the time and scrub back and forth until I get to the point I want to cut. Click the cut icon on the toolbar, then move the mouse to where the red line is and click. Thats the first cut point. Repeat for the second cut point, then highlight the bit between and press the trash icon. Simple. I then moved the various bits down the video to bunch it all up and get rid of the gaps and finally exported out to a new fresh ogv file. Job done.

A couple of things though. I could probably RTFM a bit and find out how to en-masse drag all the video down the timeline to get rid of the gaps. I could also do with figuring out how to make my defaults in the output renderer stick (I had to keep changing from stereo to mono and 44K to 22K audio), or find some way to make my own export profile. I’m sure this is probably documented somewhere, however the point I’m making is that to do the basics I didn’t need to read any manuals. Pitivi just worked.

This is quite a departure from my previous experience of video editors. I appreciate that all applications have some learning curve and video editors are especially complex beasts. However part of my motivation for doing this series of screencasts was to develop a fast efficient workflow, and be able to pass that on to others. If I can tell a new potential screencaster that they can install two apps – one for recording, one for editing – and know confidently that they can churn out a good quality screencast to short order then that has got to be a great way to get more people in.

So, thanks to Pitivi I now have a new screencast up on the site called Ubuntu Dual Boot Install.

Also note we’re now distributing the video both from YouTube as well as Blip.tv and of course the main site too. You can also get them via iTunes if that’s your bag. Also a big thank you to Michael from UbuntuClips who originally registered the YouTube account for me 2 years ago!

                          

My goal is to create a short (less than 10 min) video of the Ubuntu install process. I don’t want to have to do much in the way of post recording editing, but the install process is 20-30 mins long, so I want to use the ‘PAUSE’ function in recordmydesktop. When the Ubuntu installer gets to something long running and dull I just press CTRL+ALT+P to pause the recording. When the long running process (e.g. scanning partitions or copying files) has finished I unpause with the same keyboard combo.

The problem is that when I unpause the video capture only seems to grab changes since the unpause, not since the pause. This leads to frames which are a mixture of two screens.

The only alternative I can see is to use a video editor to cut the lengthy chunks out. If someone knows of an editor which will load an ogv from recordmydesktop and let me skip forward to one point, highlight a chunk of the video, delete it and save it with no loss of quality or hair, I’d love to hear it. Alternatively patches to recordmydesktop would be even better

Update: Based on some suggestions in the comments I have now tried a few video editors on my 64-bit Ubuntu Karmic system.

OggConvert: Converts the ogv made by rmd into an ogv (I know this sounds mad, but sometimes re-encoding means other apps can open a file when the original could not)
Avidemux: Can’t open the ogv made by rmd or oggconvert
Kdenlive: Can’t play the ogv made by rmd, locks up playing the one made by oggconvert.
Open Movie Editor: Can’t play the ogv made by rmd – looks corrupted, also corrupts when playing the ogv made by oggconvert, crashes when resizing preview window
OpenShot Video editor: Crashes on the File-Open dialog, installs ffmpeg in /usr/local/bin which takes precedence over the ubuntu ffmpeg package in /usr/bin which is sub-optimal
Blender: Can’t play the ogv made by rmd, complains that ffmpeg can’t understand the file created by oggconvert.
Pitivi: Opens, edits and renders the video but won’t let me choose the frame rate that the original video was made, in but forces me to use one from a list.

Now, admittedly I’m using a ppa for the ogv theora encoder to give me the high quality thusnelda encoder, however the same result occurs with an ogv video created with rmd _without_ using the thusnelda encoder. Both Totem and Mplayer can _play_ the video just fine.