[dot] Videos of KimDaBa in Action

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1127672936/

From: Jesper Pedersen <blackie at kde.org>
Dept: lets-show-them-how-to-use-it
Date: Sunday 25/Sep/2005, @13:28

Videos of KimDaBa in Action
===========================

   For those of you who do not understand how to use KimDaBa
[http://ktown.kde.org/kimdaba], there is now no reason not to use it. 
KimDaBa is the first KDE application to offer small flash videos with
voice-overs describing how to use it.  See the tutorials at KimDaBa's
video page [http://ktown.kde.org/kimdaba/videos/] or read on below for
Jesper's description of how and why to make video tutorials of
applications.

     There is a sentence I hear from my users rather often: "This is
exactly the software I need, I just wish I had found it a long time
ago".

     Now if KimDaBa is that good, why isn't everybody in the whole world
using it? One reason might be its name (and I am considering renaming it
to something boring but more obvious, suggestions very welcome). 
Another reason might be that it is different to many other photo
managing applications in some ways. This is not a bug, but simply
because it approaches the problem differently, which is its strength.

     I've tried remedying this problem by offering a demo setup the
first time people start KimDaBa, and now I'm ready with a new approach:
flash videos including voice-overs
[http://ktown.kde.org/kimdaba/videos/] that shows KimDaBa in use.

     This has actually been on my wish list for years, but I never found
any appropriate tool that would allow me to both record my screen action
and add voice so I could explain what users are seeing.

     Before I tell you how I did it, let me send a strong thank you in
the direction of Rainer Endres who held a presentation on the topic at
Akadamy 2006.

     The tools to use are vnc2swf
[http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/] plus any audio editing tool, I
ended up using the ahem Gnome application called Sweep
[http://www.metadecks.org/software/sweep/]. I tried for hours to get
audacity [http://audacity.sourceforge.net/tt] working as I was told that
was the best, but without success.

     My work flow was the following:

 First write down the voice-over in a text file - ensure to speak it out
loud to yourself, what sounds good on paper might not sounds good when
speaking. Next record the audio part (That was by far the hardest part,
it took me approximately an hour to record a 1 minute voice-over).
Following that you must record the video part. For that I created a new
user, logged into the user's account, and executed: vncserver -geometry
640x480. That starts a VNC session for the user that is no larger than
640x480, which seems to be the highest to go if it should all be visible
at playback time on a 1024x768 display.  Time to log in to the newly
started server, for that I used a command similar to krdc -h localhost:1
Now you should be capable of seeing the new user's session in a vnc
window. If KDE doesn't start automatically in the VNC session, simply
run export DISPLAY=:1 followed by startkde from your new user's shell.
Now it is time to run a command similar to vnc2swf.py -o video.vnc
localhost 5901, this will bring up a dialogue where you can start and
stop recording. While recording, move your mouse around as dictated in
the voice-over. The tricky part was that vnc2swf grabbed my audio
device, so to play back the voice-over I had to convert it to mp3, and
play it on my mp3 player. The final step is to combine the video and
audio, which is done with a command similar to: edit.py -c -o video.swf
-a audio.mp3 video.vnc, that gives you a video.html file which will
start video.vnc.
     Now you know how to do it, no more excuses, get started recording
videos for your favourite application. Well only valid excuse is that
you now want to try out KimDaBa [http://ktown.kde.org/kimdaba/] now you
know how to use it.