[sugar] idea for a tutorial recording activity

[Eduardo H Silva]

Sometime ago I checked out recordmydesktop (
http://recordmydesktop.iovar.org/about.php) to see how feasible it would be
for XO owners to record screencasts. It is a command-line program, with
separate gtk and qt frontends.

I installed it into my B4 using
yum install recordmydesktop
I did some testing of the options the program has, and tried to tune them to
get a balance between the speed of the system while recording, the size of
the final video (5.6 MB for 6 minutes in my test) and speed when playing the
video on a XO (also good with my test).
The command I used was:
recordmydesktop  --no-sound  -v  quality 10  -delay 10  -fps 10
and the output:
http://ia341239.us.archive.org/2/items/ScreencastOfBetaVersionOfSugarDesktopOnAXoLaptop/tmpNfhxcl.ogg

It has the ability to record sound as well (which I disabled), so if in your
activity you enabled the microphone while recording, it would be possible to
do what you wanted, the kid/narrate things.

Eduardo


2007/12/10, tridge at samba.org <tridge at samba.org>:
>
> I'd like some feedback on an idea for a tutorial recording activity.
>
> The idea is to allow the kids and teachers to use the laptop to create
> their own tutorials on how to use the laptop, or how do do some neat
> trick with it, program it, use an activity etc. The recording can be
> in their own language, with explanations at their own level.
>
> The idea came from a recent experience where I created some flash
> movies showing how clustered Samba works, and the great positive
> feedback I got from that (see
> http://samba.org/~tridge/ctdb_movies/). We already had detailed
> documents on how to setup clustered Samba and what it could do, but
> the movies made a big difference anyway. People respond to
> demonstrations more than documents.
>
> The basic tool I'm thinking of using is pyvnc2swf:
>
> http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/pyvnc2swf.html
>
> combined with x11vnc.
>
> The activity would start with a dialog box like this:
>
>    ===============================================
>    To start recording your tutorial, click RECORD
>             To end recording press Alt-7
>
>                 <RECORD>    <CANCEL>
>    ===============================================
>
> When RECORD is clicked the dialog would go away, and the laptop would
> be fully usable as normal. All activity will be recorded, including
> voice.
>
> At the end of the recording the user clicks Alt-7, and a dialog
> appears where they get to name their recording. Then there needs to be
> a way to view recordings they have made, and share them with others,
> probably via posting to a web site.
>
> It might also be nice to allow the user to enable/disable the camera
> during the recordings with a hot-key. This would display the camera
> view as a smallish box on the right hand side, which would then become
> part of the recording.
>
> I don't know how much of this idea will be possible, as perhaps the
> cpu and/or storage constraints will make it impractical. I also don't
> know whether I'm capable of doing any of this as my python skills are
> non-existant and I don't have much spare time, but if anyone would
> like to jump in and help then I think it would be worth trying.
>
> I think this activity would be particularly useful for teacher to
> teacher communication. Some teachers will have great ideas on how to
> get the most out of these laptops, and we need a way to get those
> ideas communicated as widely as possible. This might provide a
> reasonable way to do that.
>
> I've put a trivial example of an OLPC 'calculator' tutorial that I
> have created using x11vnc on my B2 at:
>
>   http://samba.org/~tridge/OLPC/calculator.html
>
> Some problems with it:
>
> - I should have scaled it better so it fits better when viewed on a OLPC
> - sound doesn't play back when I view this on my B2. I don't know why
>    yet.
> - the movie is too large, mostly because the sound is too high
>    quality I think.
> - the Web activity consumes huge gobs of memory when playing back
>    this tiny movie. It brings my 128M laptop to a crawl.
> - gnash consumes too much cpu and memory, at least for a B2
> - the JS framing in the movie and the pause control is not very good
>
> The above example was creating running x11vnc on the B2 and running
> pyvnc2swf on my Debian laptop pointed at the B2 over a wireless
> link. I haven't got the pyvnv2swf python code running on the B2 yet
> (did I mention that my python skills are non-existant?)
>
> Cheers, Tridge
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>
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