The Digital Prism Screencast

After some experimentation I can proudly announce the start of the Digital Prism Screencast. The introduction episode is finally up and ready to be viewed by anyone who is interested. This is still a very new venture for me, so I am still in the trial and error phase as yet.

All of the content created by me for this website is released under the Creative Commons By-SA (Attributions Share-alike) licence. I do not have any commercial restrictions. This also applies to every episode on the Digital Prism Screencast. I record on my netbook at 1024x600, and the full size OGV and MP4 versions are available to download, watch and share offline, or if you'd rather watch them online you can do at my Blip.tv channel.

I had planned to embed the full sized versions into my site, but right now it's not working for me; as I said I'm still in the learning stage, so hopefully it will work out that way soon.

I am hosting at Blip.tv, and I'm experimenting with a short pre-roll advert before each viewing. This is the only form of advertising, but I can't control what adverts are shown. The very first viewing had a Windows advert which was most unfortunate, so I'll be monitoring what types of adverts are shown and the feedback from them; they may be disabled in the future although given that I'm barely able to afford food right now, an extra few bucks here and there can't hurt. I may be able to filter it to some degree to opt out of adverts for products or services by hostile proprietary companies.

I had a few teething problems and false starts over the last couple of days. I record on Linux Mint 10 Julia RC, with GTK-RecordMyDesktop. It spits out OGV files, with both video and audio in Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis respectively. This is great, it's what I want for one of the options, but I also wanted them available in a format Windows and OSX users could watch without any extra codecs. Yes I know OGG is FOSS, but Apple and Microsoft have their own commercial reasons for not including them natively.

The OGV file that it created refused to convert to anything else, with every piece of software I tried. I uploaded a very short 17 second test OGV to Blip.tv and it converted it beautifully into FLV. I thought I was onto a winner when I saw that, however the first proper attempt at the introduction episode failed twice to encode, so I tried deleting and re-uploading, where it failed another two times. I was back to the beginning, in converting it locally and uploading the final versions. A couple of people offered to help me create these files but I wanted to try to find a workflow that would be self sufficient.

I eventually found Transmageddon was capable of turning it into a pretty decent MP4 (H264+MP3) which was good enough for me, however it was hardcoded to 30fps, and my recorded episode was 15fps. Transmageddon didn't seem to work around that, so the final video was about 30mins for a 14min episode, and the jumping to different parts of the episode freaked it out.

The solution I've found was to record at 30fps, then convert to MP4 with the same configuration. It works. It may not be elegant but the results are great. I used the MP4 version as the master, where Blip.tv created an SD M4V to stream with.

During my teething issues with false starts, I had a couple of eager people wanting to download it, link to it, watch it etc and I kept changing the URLs or deleting the files, sorry guys. Now that the MP4 idea worked the introduction episode is up, watchable, downloadable and shareable.

So after all that preamble, what is the Digital Prism Screencast about? It's tutorial / demo screencasts focussing mainly on two things, Drupal and Linux Mint. I will do special episodes from time to time which don't fit into either side, but for the most part it's Drupal and Linux Mint.

In Drupal I want to draw attention to the small modules that have the UNIX philosophy of "do one thing, and do it well". It's about modules that people may not have heard of. I've found that many people (including me) have been building a Drupal site and thought "hey wouldn't it be cool if I could have X functionality here" only to check Drupal.org to find someone had thought of it, and it exists as a module I can just download and enable.

The Linux Mint episodes are aimed at new users coming from Windows or OSX who maybe have preconceptions of Linux or need some confidence in adapting to Linux, and Linux Mint / Ubuntu in particular. I will be doing episodes on the Mint tools like MintUpdate and MintBackup, as well as various things I've witnessed as common questions in the Linux Mint IRC channel such as how to customise the login screen, or the panel, or how to install software, what a package manger is etc. These will branch out from being Linux Mint specific to other cool applications such as Conky and eCub.

So please have a look at the introduction, and if you want to suggest ideas for episodes, feel free to register here and add them to the wiki. I did say at the start of this screencast that it's Linux Mint 9 Julia, that was a slip, it's Linux Mint 10 Julia. This is what happens when you're looking at notes on a different monitor while presenting, and you have no formal training. These things happen.

I do not edit these episodes, they are all in a single take from start to finish. I do prepare bullet points of what I want to cover, and in what order but beyond that I just hit record and fly wild. I do try to avoid rambling, or repeating myself. I also try to keep the episode length as short as possible while covering what I want to, and not rushing it. As I said, I'm very new to this, so I'm still learning as I go.

I created wallpapers for both Drupal and Linux Mint episodes. I've put both online too if anyone wants to use them as their desktop wallpapers, feel free. I've removed the wording so it's just the Drupal or Linux Mint logo in the Digital Prism Screencast stylee. They are both 1024x600.