[sugar] Announce: Screencast activity.

[Chris Ball]

Hi,

I started work on a Screencast activity tonight.  It's a frontend to
recordMyDesktop, which is the program Scott used for his screencasts.
Having a program on the XO that's capable of preparing shareable
tutorials could help out a lot with support, by allowing walkthroughs
to be prepared by children, teachers, and the rest of us.

The activity is (barely) functional now, including Journal integration.
The UI is entirely unpolished.

Large bugs:
  * When you're resuming a screencast from the Journal, you have to
    mouseover "Resume" and choose Browse from the dropdown, rather than
    just clicking Resume.  Is there a way to tell Sugar that I don't want
    my activity to be an option for opening the video/ogg files that it
    creates but doesn't know how to play?

  * Recordmydesktop is using /tmp as an intermediate location, which
    means that a long screencast runs the XO into OOM (or worse).

  * It reuses the icon from "Words".

  * I think the Totem plugin might be having a scaling issue when playing
    back a screencast.

Missing features:
  * There should be a checkbox for whether to include sound from the
    microphone in the screencast, which should pass --no-sound to
    recordmydesktop if unchecked.

  * Limits on how long to record, illustration of disk full percentage,
    progress meter for encoding stage?

  * i18n, icons for the buttons.

  * Find the optimal FPS setting to use.

  * We should avoid having the activity itself be present in the videos;
    perhaps by minimizing it immediately before starting recording,
    and then setting up a globally-bound keyboard shortcut for stop?

Would anyone be interested in owning this activity?  I don't have time
to finish it off properly at the moment, but I'd happily work with a
volunteer to answer questions and propose changes.

There's source here:
   http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/cjb/screencast-activity
and a bundle here:
   http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/screencast/

Thanks,

- Chris.
-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>