we have finally gotten our website up and around. we were actually done a month ago but i had to teach richard how to do everything. he didn't even know how to use a computer. jeez.

we are young and naive so be gentle.

http://screencasters.heathenx.org

also, check out richard querin's blog posting.

http://jack-of-all-tradez.blogspot.com/2007/06/new-site-is-born.html

heathenx wrote: we were actually done a month ago but i had to teach richard how to do everything. he didn't even know how to use a computer. jeez.

Hey come to think of it, I don't see any of the flashing unicorn images I asked for... Have I been cheated? I knew I should have coded it myself. Frontpage has a macro for adding those...

maybe we should do a screencast on unicorns and how to animate them. don't anyone else get any ideas...i thought of it first.

Great site btw

Ok I downloaded a file so that I could watch off the internet, but when I play a screencast on the computer I do not have the quicktime controls to pause and play am I doing something wrong?

you won't have the controls. the controls are a separate shockwave file that get called only on the html page.

heathenx wrote:you won't have the controls. the controls are a separate shockwave file that get called only on the html page.

Boy that answer sucked.

I can see that I might have to head up the public relations end of this little operation...

i knew perfectly well that this is how it worked, however, not being able to play/pause/stop might cause some NEVER to return to our website ever again. alright then. let us see what we can do to address this issue.

LOL guys I have never downloaded a swf before so I was not aware that the control would not be there.

Goes away

Nice site btw

Why are You using flash for movies that do not use features in flash.
Use mpeg-4 and some usable format of files avi, mov, ogm etc..

Just some quick feedback:

• Tell people how large the file is. If I'm going to watch a 85MB file, I want to know before I start to download it.
• A lot of people don't have fast internet so I would give the option of a low res-video.

I hope this is just me.. but watching the Glass Button Redux on my WinXP partition and the flash goes all read and breaks up just as you are moving the first gradient into place. I had to shut it down and go to the YouTube version. =(

Haven't tried any others yet... that one took awhile to load on broadband... That said, I love the way the site looks... very cool.

I hope this is just me.. but watching the Glass Button Redux on my WinXP partition and the flash goes all read and breaks up just as you are moving the first gradient into place. I had to shut it down and go to the YouTube version. =(

ha. ahh cripes! don't know what to say. i get that on occasion as well. i may have to re-encode again or simply upload the Swf again.

basically, this is why we went with flash/shockwave. youtube was our first experience with offering videos to the public. what's great about youtube is that one can watch flash videos with a play/pause/stop/volume button and it's the same look and feel for everyone...linux, mac, and win. we wanted that same user experience so we continued on with flash. we just wanted our videos to be in higher resolution so folks could see what we were doing. also, there is an envelope that one has to fit inside of when posting to youtube...100mb or less upload and 10 minutes or under video. the majority of the time, the 10 minute rule wasn't a burden. however, and i cannot speak for rfquerin (richard), i still felt like it was a monkey on my back. i wanted to make a screencast without worry about time and file size. i had gone over the 10 minute mark several times. there is nothing more annoying then shooting a screencast over and over and removing important details about the tutorial because you don't have time to explain.

so as we were mocking up our web site we tried to determine what users wanted and what platforms they might be on. flash made the most sense for streaming. but in addition, we intended to offer several other downloadable formats. Ogg, Avi, and Mpg were all chosen. i was actually most interested in Ogg in an attempt to delight our linux bretheren (that makes little sense now). but a few important things stopped us from going forward: the bandwidth load that would have an affect on our website and the amount of time that it would take to encode and upload each video. i have to say that encoding video is the suckiest thing about the whole process. i have a new appreciation for the folks over at revision3. if i could just click a button and convert videos that would be great (mencoder or ffmpeg) but each one so far has been tweaked slightly. this is something that i think i'll get better at in time but for now i'm just a pup at it. i have actually learned a lot from rfquerin but i'll never admit to it...in public...on line...in a forum...pff.

right now we do have Avi's available for us to use. afterall, this is the format that all of our screencasts have been recorded into. and so far those Avi's can be watched on my openSUSE 10.2, ubuntu 7.04, and winxp desktops. typically, our Avi screencast are all 20-100mb in file size. the swf's range in size from 10-140mb. the reason the Swf's are bigger than youtube's is because we have higher resolution (bigger picture). i worried that the size of our Swf's would burden the streaming experience with glitches. all videos stream well (well...not great) for rfquerin and i. rfquerin by the way uses ubuntu 7.04 and winxp. at the current time some videos stream worse than others and it all has to do with file size...or least that has been my experience.

so anyway, to wrap things up, i think rfquerin and i should take a second look at offering the Avi's as our downloadable version and nix the Swf's. of course i have to run that past rfquerin first. i offered the downloadable Swf out of convenience anyway because the file was already there for streaming.

changes won't happen quickly mind you. it is going to take some time to organize it and get some things re-encode and uploaded. please be patient with us. really, i am my own worst critic. and rfquerin is a ball-buster...believe me. . we just want things to work on all of our desktops and more importantly we want it to work for everyone else. although, we cannot make everyone happy but we'll knock out some of these glitches...i promise.

I think heathenx has covered the reasoning behind it quite well - surprise surprise .

However, one other thing to note:

heathenx wrote:right now we do have Avi's available for us to use. afterall, this is the format that all of our screencasts have been recorded into.

Keep in mind that - as far as I understand it - 'avi' by itself is just a generic container for video and audio information . So one avi might play fine on your machine and another one may not. This is because you can encode the avi using a multitude of different video or audio codecs. This is where the potential problems start to appear. I have encoded my avi's using ffmpeg with something called the (lavc) encoder for the video. But I could have just as well encoded it using some other codec like xvid. And the same potential for discrepancy comes from the audio encoding as well - just ask heathenx, he had a hell of a time with my original videos.

So we would have to standardize on some specific encoding, and hope that everyone has (or is willing to install) those codecs. Flash just happens to be much more ubiquitous across platforms (as heathenx mentioned) - so it really does make more sense at the moment. The problem is that standalone flash players are not easily found, but flash capable browsers are.

I have no problem with hosting another version, but I'd prefer to keep the flash format as well. As far as the extra bandwidth costs, heathenx assured me he'd pay for absolutely everything no matter what.

This type of discussion is exactly why we posted about it here.

we are young and naive so be gentle.

I can't speak for anyone else but what you two are doing in terms of teaching others on how to use the inkscape program, you must be commended. Yes there are some problems but like thing else with time it will get better. I don't think anyone was trying to be critical of what you two have done, but only trying to offer suggestions as to other possibilities to help an inkscape user if you are going to use this format. For me personally some videos did turn red and the my browser did a nosedive, but your site is not the only one I experience problems with. I just chalk it up as a technology glitch that with time will be corrected.
To be able to actually SEE what you are actually clicking does wonders for me in terms of learning this program. So with a little diligence on your part and patience on ours I am sure that your screencast will accomplish what you envision. Ok enough of my rambling, keep up the good work.

thank-you for understanding.

I think you guys are doing great... so I hope you didn't take my post as a complaint. Ever thought about offering a DVD of Screencasts? For the right price I would buy one.

I think you guys are doing great... so I hope you didn't take my post as a complaint. Ever thought about offering a DVD of Screencasts? For the right price I would buy one.

rfquerin and i are pretty easy going fellas. we are rarely serious about anything. we rip on each other like a couple of brothers...think liam and noel, chris and rich, and dave and ray.

i wasn't offended by anyone's comments. i can take criticism. although it really hurts my feelings ...kidding. in fact, i intend to learn from the comments and suggestions so that i can do better. like i said before...we won't be able to accommodate everyone but if we can make the majority of you somewhat happy then our job was a success.

regarding purchasing dvd's of our screencasts...that would be something else for us to screw up. we can't even be trusted to make a good screencast. baby steps my friend. if we can provide avi's sometime in the future then one can download those and convert to dvd(vob) rather easily.

@ capnhud - As far as the videos going red and crashing browsers, I'm pretty sure we meant to do that.. yeah that's it... right heathenx?

@ Darth_Gimp - I dunno about heathenx, but I'm completely flattered (and surprised?) that you guys find them useful. I like my ego stroked as much as the next guy, but I see the value in some criticism too. Feel free to make suggestions and tell us where you think we may have gone wrong - that's how we make things better. As far as a DVD goes, I'd mirror heathenx's comment about baby steppin' it.

Thanks to all you guys for the nice comments. For me, just putting the thing together was 100% fun (except for the part about having to deal with heathenx), and the encouragement here is just a great bonus.

looks like I solved the problem by installing the DivX drivers. I actually thought I had them in place, but did not.

I have the problem like I have this swf and I watch till some time 8 or 9 minutes and my computer just stops(win xp adobe flash player) it seems that it runs out of virtual memory on firefox streaming or from hard drive.
weird thing is that I watch youtobe and nothing like that happens, and the video from youtube extension is *.flv and I can watch it on vlc but this *.swf not
maybe you could just extract flv from this swf?

Those are amazing! Thanks so much for sharing!

They look like deceptively simple objects, but once you're through the tutorials you realize that they teach you a lot about the mechanics of Inkscape, and can be applied to a quite varied range of effects. So thanks!

As there are several good suggestions about the site, we thought we'd be terribly unique and plunk the ubiquitous 'beta' stamp on the site, just to let people know that things may be changing and improving as we go.

Keep the comments and suggestions (and of course the compliments!) going.

rfquerin wrote:plunk the ubiquitous 'beta' stamp on the site,

did you use nicu's rubber stamp tutorial to create your beta stamp?

ryanlerch wrote:

rfquerin wrote:plunk the ubiquitous 'beta' stamp on the site,

did you use nicu's rubber stamp tutorial to create your beta stamp?

As a matter of fact...

Actually I didn't go back and re-read it, but I did it based on my memory of his method when he posted about it. I just went back and looked at it now and the only difference really was that I used the pencil tool and not the calligraphy tool - and here I was thinking my memory was going due to old age.

I distinctly remember reading his tutorial when you posted about it and thinking - hey, I don't need that right now, but dang is that ever useful!