Re: Video Tutorials and marketing.

On Tue, 7 Sep 2004, Martin Sevior wrote:

> Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2004 16:54:29 +1000
> From: Martin Sevior <msevior@physics.unimelb.edu.au>
> To: abiword-dev@abisource.com
> Subject: Video Tutorials and marketing.
>
>
> Hi Folks,
> I discovered gvidcap the other day.
>
> http://xvidcap.sourceforge.net/
>
> Which allows you to make mpeg movies of your screen. I've been
> wanting something like this for a while so I can show off some of
> AbiWord's cool interactive features.

I cant help thinking there has to be a more appropriate codec for this
kind of thing than MPEG 4, just as we use PNG instead of JPEG for
screenshots it seems strange not to have a better codec for Animation and
cartoons. (I'm sure one could generate some extremely compact MNG files
that simulated the features but that would probably be a horrendous waste
of time).

With some difficulty I got the file to play using Windows Media Player 6
(mplayer2.exe, it correctly downloaded the necessary codec automatically)
but as usual the newer versions of Media Player failed to work properly.

Perhaps there is a problem with my setup (there are many problems, the
first of which is that it is Windows XP, but anyway) but the video quality
was really awful and full of artifacts (like a jpeg at about 10% quality,
it was that bad). If I didn't know what the video was supposed to be
showing I wouldn't have known what was going.

I assume it works well on other non-Microsoft systems but you would be
well advised to make sure it works for windows or the marketing effort may
back fire.

> Other videos which come to mind are:
>
> 1. Auto updating Word Count (including response to selections)
> 2. Using the insert table, table split and table merge dialogs to create
> complex tables.
> 3. Using the Text folding feature of the bullets and numbering dialog.
>
> Other ideas I haven't thought of yet!
>
> Of course since the videos are so huge, it might be just as easy for
> users to download AbiWord and try for the themselves, but these are
> novel features that users may not know about.
>
> I'll try mpeg4 compression next to see how much we gain.

If you use mpeg please try to use the Xvid codec if possible, as far as I
know it is the only properly open source MPEG4 codec.

> So how do people feel about having an archive of these things as part of
> our marketing effort?

Definately sounds like a good idea in principle.

- Alan
Received on Tue Sep 7 15:20:42 2004