Anyone Intrested in new Project

[Philip Rodrigues]

I'd like to give my thoughts on how best to go about this, along with what I 
know of the existing work, so it doesn't just get duplicated or ignored.

My first thought is that as the docs team, we'd like to have these "video 
screenshots" (for want of a better name) in the documentation, where they can 
complement and greatly enhance the verbal description that we already have. 
This also puts them within the oversight of an existing group and procedure. 
So, I think a good place to have this discussion would be on 
kde-doc-english at kde.org. kde-quality is fine too, but please keep k-d-e 
informed.

My second (well, one-and-a-halfth) thought is that your idea taken as a whole 
is very ambitious. To set up a website, community, content and new technology 
all at once takes a lot of manpower. I think it would be much more manageable 
if you start with just the technical part, viz setting up the tools to 
produce these "video screenshots". To this end, I've braindumped below 
everything I can think of about the existing research. Once you have an idea 
of what tools are available, and what limitations they have, you're in a 
better position to decide whether to have the "video screenshots" in the 
docs, or outside the docs (on a website), distributed with KDE or not, etc.

That's all for advice and recommendations. The promised braindump follows:

The main work on this has been done by Rainer Endres, and he presented it at 
akademy '05. He evaluated a number of existing tools for producing "video 
screenshots", and, if I remember the talk correctly, found that they all 
sucked in various ways, and the one that sucked least was pyvnc2swf [1]. He, 
and others, used pyvnc2swf to create some simple video screenshots for the 
KDE 3.4 feature guide [2]. Birger Kollstrand pointed out Wink [3], which is 
free for use, but not open source.

A random thought that occurs to me (file under "wouldn't it be cool"), is that 
since, generally NX > vnc, then a hypothetical nx2swf would be > vnc2swf. 
(ie, a program that intercepts the NX data somewhere to make a screenie from 
it, in the same way as vnc2swf does with the vnc data). I haven't thought 
carefully about it, but it might be worth asking the NX developers whether 
such a thing is technically feasible, if the existing tools turn out to not 
be good enough (for some well-defined value of "good enough").

Some other things that might be requirements/technical issues to be solved, 
depending on how you plan to do this: translations, inclusion in the 
documentation toolchain, updating when, eg, the default KDE style changes. 

For the first and last of those, KDExecutor [4] might be useful - it can save 
a set of steps performed in a KDE app, and replay them. Then you can just 
change the (language|default style), rerun the steps, and have the new video 
with the changed settings. Sander Koning has done some work on this for 
(static) screenshots: if you're interested, ask on kde-doc-english and he'll 
tell you more.

As far as inclusion in the docs toolchain goes, the docs team can probably 
handle that - we have some expertise in fiddling XSL and the other necessary 
stuff.

Braindump complete. I should note that I don't have time to work directly on 
this myself, although if you choose to take the route I've suggested, I'll 
try to provide any general guidance you need if I can.

Regards,
Philip

1. http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/pyvnc2swf.html
2. http://features.physos.net/ - see the "watch the video" links
3. http://www.debugmode.com/wink/
4. http://www.klaralvdalens-datakonsult.se/?page=products&sub=kdexecutor
-- 
KDE Documentation Team: http://i18n.kde.org/doc
KDE Documentation Online: http://docs.kde.org
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