Re: [Usability] Cheap Open Source Morae Alternative

[Máirín Duffy <mairin linuxgrrl com>]

On Wed, 2009-12-09 at 13:53 +0800, Allan Caeg wrote:
> Hello UX people!
> 
> I'm looking for a top-notch user testing tool like Morae. As an open
> source enthusiast, I want something that works on Linux (specifically,
> on GNOME). As a person with a tight budget, I want something affordable.
> 
> Among many other features, Morae ( http://www.techsmith.com/morae.asp )
> records a video of the user while using the product via webcam along
> with the voice (for the think aloud protocol), and the screencast. 
> 
> I want to do those with open source software for work and open source
> contributions. What tool can you suggest? If there's no equivalent tool,
> is there an easy way to consolidate different open source apps like
> gtk-recordmydesktop, the Sound Recorder, Cheese, etc, to make them work
> as an all-in-one user testing tool like Morae?

If you have the streams from cheese / recordmydesktop / soundrecorder
you can put them together using gstreamer. I have a portable usability
lab [1] that uses a DVR to gather video & audio - but the gstreamer
pipeline I use [2] for constructing my videos could be modified fairly
easily for your case if you've already got the media you want. The
challenge here of course is obtaining streams that are synched correctly
- it would be hard to press record on all at exactly the same time so
you might be better off scripting existing command-line tools to do it,
and making a gui to kick off the script. 

At the GNOME Boston Summit there was some interest in potentially
putting together a GUI tool to do this but unfortunately my bad - I
didn't follow up after my talk they expressed interest in and I don't
know their names.

Do you know of any developers who would be willing to put together this
kind of app? I would be interested in getting involved but I don't have
coding chops (although I'm getting good poking at gstreamer pipelines
along the lines of what you would need) - maybe we should put together
some mockups of what we are looking for in such a gui tool and nag a
developer to help us out?

~m

[1]
http://mairin.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/open-source-portable-usability-testing-lab/  (don't use the pipeline here it's old)
[2]
http://blogs.gnome.org/halfline/2009/10/11/video-4-way-split-screen-gstreamer-pipeline/  (the usability lab module link there is the one to use)