Re: [Usability] screenshot & recording desktop video

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Sun, 12 Jun 2005, Ross Burton wrote:

> Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 14:39:40 +0100
> From: Ross Burton <ross burtonini com>
> To: Corey Burger <corey burger gmail com>
> Cc: usability gnome org
> Subject: Re: [Usability] screenshot & recording desktop video
>
> On Fri, 2005-06-10 at 11:08 -0700, Corey Burger wrote:
> > The only issue I see with it is that you allow you user to choose a
> > codec, which is probably bad news. Better to simply record it, and
> > then if needed, it can be transcoded later.

Maybe we could hide the Codec information behind a disclosure
triangle/expander widget if people really wantd but given the lack of
consenous on the most suitable format I doubt we could justify removing
it.

If we choose anything other than Ogg Theora as the default will the
distributors repsect that choice, can we actually pick a format the Free
Software based distributions would not want to rip out and replace?

> Are Ogg Theora and MPEG4 the best codecs for screen grabs?

I think that would depend a lot on what you are actually recording and for
what purpose (text, video and photos, or simple low colour graphics?).
I think the original intention of this and the kind of use developers have
made of this technology is for recording simple application demos and
tutorials, pretty much as a step up from Screenshots hence the reasonably
initial suggestion of combining the two tools.

I would expect for any substantial task one would not want any of the
formats suggested so far and instead a fairly raw video dump that could be
post processed.  The same way I crop many of my screenshots I would want
to Pan and Scan and only include the most relevant parts of the video.

Where is the support for these formats coming from?  Gstreamer presumably,
so just as EOG takes what it gets from GdkPixbuf so too would this Screen
recorder take whatever it gets, all we can really do is try and recommend
a suitable default.

> Flash can use a codec called Screen Video Format which is designed for
> compressing screen captures.

I'm sure users will use the screen recorder in ways the developers might
not have expected.

I predict some people will try and use the Screen Recorder to transcode
Movies, even if there are better technical ways to do it the path of least
resistance would be to use the screen recorder.

> http://butterfeet.org/blog/?p=10 is a blog post about Xideo, which uses
> Damage to grab the screen regions as they change and encodes them into a
> Flash file with an embedded SVF stream.  There is an example stream, as
> SVG is lossless you will notice how sharp the movie is.

Sorry could you please clarify.

Was that reference to SVG (as in Scalable Vector Graphics) a typo and did
you in fact mean to type SVF (Screen Video Format) again (or even SWF
Shock Wave Format)?

And people wonder why I hate acronyms.

Confused and confuzzled

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/