digital home of MacSlow

Guadec
Guadec probably means many things for different people, and it is very likely that every attendee had a very special experience during the last week in Vilanova. While several folks have already blogged about their impressions I want to add my personal view to this sharing of memories. I do not exaggerate by calling the past week in Vilanova to be one of the most intense, impressive and enjoyable times I had in years… this is not coming from my keyboard lightheadedly. Two weeks before guadec it was not clear I end up being in Vilanova in the first place. Once that somehow did fall into place (huge thanks to Quim Gil and Jeff Waugh again) I was just expecting me to be a mere beholder and lurker during the conference. Fair enough and certainly more than one could ask for. Instead of me just running around drooling about who I could meet and talk to, there were even people who came to me and were glad to see me and talk to me. This absolutely knocked me off my feet, really! Everybody was so down-to-earth and approachable no matter how much of a figurehead or contributer to the community he or she was. Note, this does not imply I expected anyone to be arrogant. One could also hardly tell (well, ok except for branded t-shirts maybe and if you happened to know who was with which company) the bunch of people where from competing companies… it felt more like one community forming an entity. If only one could have been able to fill part of this spirit and atmosphere into bottles and take with them back home to share this with peers and friends, who don’t know about the stuff yet, which makes us tick and do the things we do. How can this be topped next year in Birmingham, I wonder Thanks to everybody for making a greenhorn like me feel so welcome and being part of the community! To prevent extensive name-dropping of individuals (not that the people would not deserve it) I want to shell out special thanks to the fine folks from RedHat, Novell, LUGRadio, Fluendo, Sun, Nokia, Imendio, Canonical and about two dozens of individuals I was able to spent time with at this guadec… you rock my world!

LUGRadio Live! 2006
I am already looking forward to be going to LUGRadioLive 2006 in Wolverhampton, England roughly three weeks from now and meeting people from guadec again and new faces of course! There I will do my first talk ever… on lowfat and what I have in mind for desktop-related things. New ideas and concepts I gathered at guadec will also be incorporated into this talk now. I will also try to add my twist on things which might be of some value for Topaz with this talk.

Screencasting
Here is is the long overdue mini-tutorial for my way of going about screencasting. Read it as it is, take from it what is of value to you and do not ask questions. I made this stuff work for me, on my special setup of hardware and software. Things might turn out to work slightly or largely different for you and your setup. This is totally not fool-proof and you need to know how to help yourself if parts turn out not to work as described.

I grabbed the plain debian .deb of xvidcap from here and installed it on my Ubuntu 6.06 machine. Compiling form source turned out to be too much of a hassle for me (just to get screencasting working). But doing this forced me making a dummy sym-link for /usr/lib/libpng.so.2, because the binary of givdcap (gtk+ frontend of xvidcap) wants this in order to successfully start. Yeah, that is an ugly hack. Because of this I only use gvidcap to capture to single .ppm frames. To assemble the single frames from a screencasting-session into a video-clip I’ve written a small bash-script with two commands, which utilize the combined powers of convert (ImageMagick), ffmpeg, mencoder, ffmpeg2theora and file. Start gvidcap, select the area of the screen you want to capture, make sure you capture to single .ppm frames (preferences menu), don’t use more than 20 fps (using more usually make gvidcap crash for me), record your session, let one of the commands (encode_images_to_avi or encode_images_to_ogg with proper options) from the bash-script run over the resulting bunch of single image-files and be happy about the final screencasting clip. Why do I not use currently maintained tools like istanbul, byzanz or the like? They impose limitations on me, which I can not tolerate. It is usually about sub-par image-quality, inability to capture fast graphics (animated OpenGL or cairo) or not working in composited environments (compiz, xcompmgr), questionably formats, missing option to just record uncompressed high-quality single frames (which are invaluable for later “beautifying” and stageing in movie-editors and sound-adding).

If you - as in hackers on current screen-capture tools - want good input on what is really needed, listen to people like Quim Gil. People like him (the marketeers, evangelists and pimpers) are very keen on getting their hands on solid and powerful tools and wanting to do the screencasts to pimp and show-off the bells and whistles of our beloved desktop-environments. The ultimate OpenSource-approach for solving this very sore spot once and for all would be (imo) to go about it the “Jokosher-way”… let Quim & Co write a thorough spec of what they want in a screen-capture toolchain of dreams and let the capable community-hackers do their coding magic. Coders, be the enabling amplifiers for getting some serious show-off power into the hands of our marketing-team! JFDI!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 4th, 2006 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.