We are the Screencasters at heathenx.org.

The creators of the Screencasters honed their skills through the frequent use of cassette recorders from the late 70’s as little kids. Yes, we’re that old. With these recorders we pretended to be journalists and sportscasters, and better yet, we were able to capture the voices of our big sister’s hottie friends without them knowing it. We had to wait until the 80’s before we could get our grubby little hands on a computer. If any of you have seen the movie War Games then you’ll know that we didn’t have much for computers back then…other than being able to hack into NORAD’s mainframe, which EVERYBODY with a computer did back then. It was fun for 5 minutes…then we’d get bored and head outdoors to play wiffleball.

Fast forward a few decades to present day. Here we are again, abandoning the cassette recorder for a brand new medium…screencasting. But at least we’re still using our same computers from the 80’s…a Tandy TRS-80 and a Commodore Vic-20. Just kidding. Are you still reading this? Seriously though, our computers nowadays are fairly fast. Recording our desktop is a great way for us to make tutorials for online learning.

The goal of screencasters.heathenx.org is to provide a means, through a simple website, of allowing new users of the Inkscape community to watch some basic and intermediate tutorials by the authors of this website. We feel that through a screencast we can better convey the steps required to recreate our graphics or perhaps just provide a little inspiration.

The wonderful developers of Inkscape have allowed for its users to install the application on all three of the major operating systems: Linux, Macintosh, and Windows. This allows us the flexibility to use Inkscape where it is needed. We will not show bias toward any one operating system (even though we are both Linux enthusiasts). Each of them have their pros and cons. Our emphasis, rather, will be on Inkscape itself.

We hope that you enjoy our tutorials. The creators of this website are not in the graphics arts field nor are we professionals in audio and video. We are hobbyists. We love using free and open source software to produce our screencasts. In the future we hope to produce better videos as we gain experience. That might take years though. Until then you’ll have to put up with the odd audio crackle, the occasional video glitch, and now and again one of our kids jumping up and down in the background while daddy is recording.

Screencast Licensing

Our screencast videos are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. This means we encourage you to share and/or remix the work as long as you give us credit for the original work, use it for non-commercial purposes, and attach a similar license to any remixed or altered work you may derive from it. Pretty simple.

Screencast Formats

Our screencasts are provided in two basic formats. We offer a streaming format in Adobe Flash (FLV) for on-line viewing and a format in H.264/MPEG-4 (AVI) for off-line viewing. Obviously, you will need a Flash plug-in installed for your browser in order to watch the streaming version. If you are able to watch our YouTube screencasts then you will be able to watch our higher resolution versions on this web site.

We have chosen H.264 AVI’s above other video formats due to it’s quality and file size. Of course there might be issues playing this format without the proper codecs installed. To our knowledge this format does not play out-of-the-box on a Windows XP computer. We recommend three solutions for viewing our off-line videos: VLC or SMPlayer and/or K-Lite Codec Pack. It is never easy to pick just one video format and hope that it plays well on all operating systems. At some point maybe we can offer more formats.

VLC and SMPlayer are free and cross-platform media players that once installed will play many video and audio formats. With these players one will be able to watch our H.264 (and FLV) off-line screencasts without problems.

K-Lite Codec Pack is a collection of codecs for playing various audio and video types. We recommend the Standard version because the Basic version does not have H.264 support. Once installed you will need to go into the Configuration>ffdshow>Video decoder configuration, find H.264/AVC, and select the libavcodec as the decoder for video. In addition, you will need to go into the Configuration>ffdshow>Audio decoder configuration, find MP3, and select mp3lib as the decoder for audio. Those two adjustments alone will be all that is required to play our AVI’s on Windows XP in just about any media player of your choice.

As far as we know all of our H.264 and FLV videos play well on all of our Ubuntu and openSUSE Linux computers that we have in our arsenal. Since Richard an I are not Mac users we can only hope that everything works accordingly.

Inkscape

A little about the free and open source software that we use.

Here is a snippet from the Inkscape website:

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.

Inkscape’s main goal is to create a powerful and convenient drawing tool fully compliant with XML, SVG, and CSS standards. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development