Re: [Hampshire] Eye Candy

On Fri, 2007-01-12 at 11:50 +0000, Fintan Gaughan wrote:
> Hello everyone hope you all recovered well from New Year celebrations.
>

Happy new year!

> Right now I am setting up my computer so it will show some eye candy.
> I find that people are more interested in Linux when showing what's
> cool and to be honest people upgrade say xp to vista as it shows some
> eye candy. And sadly most people are work are willing to upgrade till
> I showed a video of my desktop.

A common problem. I think a lot of windowsy people would like to "try
before they 'buy'" - which the live CD gives them of course. They also
like the monkey to perform for them. Part of me thinks this may be a
legitimate request, part of me thinks that some of these people are just
using excuses to not try it. That doesn't apply to everyone of course.

> Using a session desktop recorder
> called Istanbul
> http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Utilities/Istanbul-12358.shtml

I know it well.

> luckily
> I had vlc at my work desktop on windows xp to show my Linux desktop to
> view as it was a .DAT format.

Istanbul records to OGG/Theora/Vorbis by default - in fact I don't think
it can record to any other format.

> Does anybody know how to change or know of a different desktop
> recording program so I can convert it to windows media file.

I use xvidcap [0] to do all my screencasts. You can see them online [1].
That page requires flash if you want to watch them embedded in the
browser as it used Google Video. However if you click the title of any
video you will see a page where you can download the OGG, MPEG and MP4
(for most) versions which should play okay on Windows.

Xvidcap has many options for the output format, I'm sure you can find
one that works on Windows.

> As I want
> to email it to people and in turn they may forward others just to show
> what Linux can do. Also so I can upload it to you tube and my blog can
> link to it as you tube only accept QuickTime .MOV, Windows .AVI, or
> .MPG formats.
>

If you record using xvidcap to MPEG2 then you can convert to other
formats using tools like ffmpeg and avidemux. I wrote a lengthy detailed
how-to in a bit of a hurry [2] which I am in the process of cleaning up
[3] and will finish shortly.

> Also do you know any links like step by step to make desktop look cool
> looking at http://www.kde-look.org some of the stuff I have
> downloaded does not work instructions are not very good there.
>

I don't know KDE I'm afraid, so can't answer that. I did make a
screencast [4] for changing the Ubuntu (GNOME) desktop though.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Al.

[0] http://xvidcap.sf.net/
[1] http://doc.ubuntu.com/screencasts/
[2] http://popey.com/Creating_Screencasts
[3] http://doc.ubuntu.com/screencasts/Creating_Screencasts
[4] http://doc.ubuntu.com/screencasts/Customising_Ubuntu_Desktop