UltimateScreencastingApplication

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Summary

A full-featured screencasting application is needed for Ubuntu.

It's too hard to produce high quality, full length screencasts, and this is why most people don't do it.

Release Note

It is mandatory.

Rationale

Right now the following tasks are done when I create a screencast:-

  1. Setup environment to record (qemu/vnc)
  2. Record video of what occurs on the desktop (xvidcap/recordmydesktop/istanbul)
  3. Playback video (totem)
  4. Edit video (avidemux)
  5. Record simple titles to insert at points in the video (OO.o/xvidcap)
  6. Use transitioning effects (to show titles sliding in and out for example) in the titles (OO.o/xvidcap)
  7. Insert titles in between video (avidemux)
  8. Record audio (audacity)
  9. Dub audio over video (audacity)
  10. Re-encode screencasts to different formats (ffmpeg)

Problems with the above include:-

  • Many disparate applications used to created a simple video - no single unified tool that will do all of it (unlike on Windows where there are such tools).
  • Using QEMU (or any other VM) is resource intensive and beyond the skills of some users
  • No application to easily create titles (using OO.o is somewhat overkill for this)

Things I'd also like but can't/don't currently do

  1. Zoom in to highlight items
  2. Select area using mouse + special key combination to highlight/focus on a part of the screen

This is clearly a quite mentally difficult to do. If we're ever going to get substantial quantities of people contributing to this project it all needs to be made easier (or we lower our standards Sad :( ).

Use Cases

Assumptions

Design

Gstreamer can record the contents of the screen (or indeed a window) and is what Istanbul (screencasting app) is based on. Pitivi

Implementation

UI Changes

Code Changes

Migration

Test/Demo Plan

Outstanding Issues

BoF agenda and discussion

CategorySpec

UltimateScreencastingApplication (last edited 2008-08-06 16:30:16 by localhost)