Comments on: Byzanz 0.2.0

By: otte

otte — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 10:34:34 +0000

The biggest problem with sound support is having a simple user interface for doing sound recording, in particular because the (default) GIF format does not support it.

So unless I can come up with a good solution to that (and it has to work, too – but I guess microphones are not the headache they were last I tried), I might look into it.

Of course, if you want to try, go ahead and send patches. :)

By: Pablo Rodríguez

Pablo Rodríguez — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 10:02:18 +0000

Sorry, my system is too old to check this (openSUSE-11.1), but do you plan to support sound recording in Byzanz?

By: otte

otte — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:59:33 +0000

fixed!

By: Peter Lund

Peter Lund — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 09:33:37 +0000

“Byzanz does not attempt to do be smarter than you are. ”

“to do be” ? ;)

By: otte

otte — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 09:12:40 +0000

Michael: yeah, it’s a bit bad that it requires git master of all packages – but I wanted to get a release out.

Christian: Dude, it’s so easy, you can record your screenshots yourself! (Yes, Byzanz needs a webpage but I’m lazy.)

Dave: Yeah, Theora proper has some interesting capabilities that I might want to exploit, like 4:4:4 YUV input and variable frame rate. But considering I’m doing this from GStreamer and relying on its colorspace conversion etc plugins, it’s kinda hard to use theora directly. Maybe I should hack the GStreamer plugin instead…

Dylan: I’d like to hear from people that actually do screen recordings for how they post-process their recordings. At that point, it should be kinda trivial to extend Byzanz and GStreamer (and Pitivi?) to use a format that provides all the needed information (and tools?) to make the recordings awesome. But I haven’t really heard of people doing recordings.

By: Dylan

Dylan — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:15:02 +0000

Hope you find a way to include key/mouse events. Maybe a record first, tweak later approach will be less obtrusive. That is, store key presses and mouse clicks in a separate file, and merge them afterwards based on timestamp, like subtitles. As a matter of fact, just storing the events in a file format that can be read by Gnome Subtitles would be very useful, because that would allow you to tweak/annotate the recording afterwards.

By: Dave

Dave — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:49:57 +0000

The latest Theora includes support for Variable Frame Rate. It’s a bit of a hack based on detecting if two frames are identical and noting that fact. So while you technically still have a constant rate of Frames, some of them can be no-ops. I imagine this would be very useful for screencasts where nothing is happening a lot of the time.

http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo8.html

Theora will detect duplicate frames itself and so this improvement in bitrate and decode performance will just happen under the covers, but if you are aware of the duplication ahead of time you can feed this info to the encoder and save it some work.

Are you aware of anything that would allow Byzanz to provide this info to Theora, based on its knowledge of whether the screen has updated or not?

By: Christian Kellner

Christian Kellner — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 23:44:41 +0000

Self-Reference missing alert. I mean. Where is the ogg/flash/gif video of the new version. Eh? ;-)

By: Michael

Michael — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 22:53:46 +0000

Very nice, but too bad for me, this requires git version of the various component. I think you should maybe blog again in some time, once the various bits have landed in the distribution ( I was planning to update the mandriva rpm, without success ).