Simple Screencasts - but flash-based
Hi,
Someone very kindly contacted me this week, explaining he was setting-up some screencasts to show how basic everyday uses happened on Ubuntu. He suggested that such screencasts could be used on GetGNULinux.org.
Unfortunately the screencasts are made with proprietary (but gratis) software, and require Flash to be displayed. That was a real disapointment for me, because judging from the high quality of the work this was really interesting.
He is setting up a page with several screencasts. At time of writing only one is up: rip a cd.
I answered saying that it would be very inappropriate for us to put this on GGL because of its proprietary nature.
However, I thought we could maybe link towards his page from the "Linux" page. I am still a little unsure about this, so what do you think?
with vnc2swf you can easily create flash screencasts as well - but that's free software. There is also the free program vncrec, which saves the recording in a special format; apparently, transcode can read (and thus convert) this format - which I haven't managed to do thus far.
edit: actually, I just figured out a way to get the thing into mplayer, and thus mencoder
http://recordmydesktop.sourceforge.net/ (Theora; sound not supported yet)
http://xvidcap.sourceforge.net/ (MPEG and Flash)
I tried xvidcap before, as well as Istanbul, but they didn't perform too well for me back on Arch. Istanbul seems to be a bit too CPU hungry and xvidcap, aside from not being in development anymore as it seems, I've had some issues I can't remember now...
I didn't know about RecordMyDesktop though.
So do these .wnk files even play on GNU/Linux without too many magic tricks? If he has to do flash maybe it's better to just use .flv as that can play with mplayer..
A program I see used is xscreencast - I think it's what Mirco Muller uses for his demos of LowFat.
excellent. I have no time myself to try these out but I am coming back on the said person with this forum thread address
This does not solve the Flash problem, though. To show a screencast, video files are very unappropriate. Does anyone know of a Flash alternative?
Both mplayer and vlc, and probably others, can play flash video (.flv) files. I'm not sure if that's what the recording software creates? Anyway it is a proprietary format.
For really nice and efficient screencasts, I would recommend a javascript driven slideshow with a javascript "mouse pointer" moving over them. But these take a lot of work to create... I guess it shouldn't be too difficult to write a tool that captures the screen in that way though!
Huh? The flash you're talking about is video.