Richard and I monkeyed around with the new Firefox 3.5 release candidate and the new HTML5 video tag for OGG/Theora content over the weekend. Even though we haven’t figured out how to do some things with the player controls, we were able to post a sample screencast in OGG format. I won’t post a link to it just yet because we’re still playing with it. The result looked outstanding. The video was crystal clear for a screencast. No blurryness and no artifacting. I bet our viewers are going to love this. The only hiccup I could see was that it didn’t stream the video as well as Flash regarding our intro at the beginning of our screencast. The actual Inkscape tutorial played well. Not sure why the intro was a little choppy. Is that bandwidth related?…is it CPU related?…I’m not sure. Maybe it just needed to cache a little more before playing. Regardless, I don’t think it’s a deal breaker. Perhaps I’m not doing something right. With some more experimenting maybe we’ll figure it out. Oh, Richard did claim that we wasn’t hearing any sound but that’s probably just due to the fact that he runs Linux completely in a terminal without any GUI. Who needs audio when you’re compiling kernels all day? Yes, he’s pretty hard core.

Anyway, it’s hard for me to hold back the excitement of it all. To move away from x264/mp3-AVI’s and Flash is really going to save Richard and I a lot of encoding time and OGG/Theora/Vorbis is an open video and audio format that soon will be supported by most major browsers…natively…no plug-ins required. Plus, we already screencast into Theora/Vorbis and have been for a very long time. Being able to rename those OGV screecasts to OGG (Why is this?) and uploading to our server is all that it takes to get a video on the web with FF 3.5 (well, beside the small HTML doc that needs to be written). It’s that easy. Of course it will take a little ffmpeg2theora to prep our videos first but that isn’t anything major. It’s still a time saver over our present Mencoder scripts that we use. Moreover, we’ll only have to upload a single OGG file and not two separate AVI and FLV files. That will make my World of Warcraft family happy since I won’t be hogging their bandwidth. Pft! Stupid games anyway.

So what does this all mean for the Screencasters.heathenx.org? Buckle up folks because we’re moving to this format really soon (next few weeks). Nothing will change in terms of how you will download and watch a screencast on-line…we’re just changing the video format to OGG only. No more AVI’s and FLV’s (not sure what we’re going to do with our Microsodes yet). Gone. But don’t freak out. Stay calm. We know people hate change. You’ll still be able to download a screencast for off-line viewing and you’ll still be able to watch screencasts for on-line viewing if you have a browser that supports HTML5. And most likely you’ll still be able to use your favorite media player to watch the off-line OGG files…VLC, GMplayer, SMplayer, Mplayer, Totem, Kaffeine, and Media Player Classic among many others. Linux users will have to do nothing since OGG is supported out of the box. Windows and Mac users can even opt to install the free OGG codec if you want to.

As far as the IE6, IE7, and IE8 users go, you may be SOL if Microsoft doesn’t implement the HTML5 video tag. Maybe IE8 already does, I don’t know. I don’t use IE and quite frankly hate it so I don’t keep up with the news. But don’t fear. Even if IE users can’t watch our screencasts on-line, you’re still able to download the OGG for off-line viewing. If that’s the case don’t blame us…blame Microsoft.

There is still some bumps that need smoothing. We don’t have everything figured out yet but we’ll be experimenting more in the next few weeks. Once we get a sample ready we’ll post a link so that you can test things yourself. Hopefully we can get some feedback from you. We want everyone to be happy, although, that’s sometimes impossible. Just as important, we want to make things easier for ourselves so that we can continue to make Inkscape screencasts with less effort. Easy is good.

There was a post on the Inkscape-users mailing list yesterday regarding a question on how to remove or delete all guides from within an Inkscape document at once. Currently in 0.46 and 0.47 we can hide all guides with a Shift+| or individually delete them one by one with a Ctrl+LMB. Another alternative is to open the SVG file in a text editor, delete the of the guides, save it and re-open it in Inkscape. The latter is really the only way that I could think of to mass delete a bunch of guides. That was until I was challenged by my good buddy Richard. Normally I would have hung my head low in defeat since I’m not much of a coder. Although this time a light bulb turned on in my head. What sprung to mind was an existing JessyInk extension that Hannes Hochreiner had written to find and remove some JessyInk elements within an SVG file. I figured most of the work was already done. I just needed to modify it into doing something a bit different. It really didn’t take me long to figure out what I needed in order to remove all of the guides but it took Hannes’ and Richards help to eliminate the error when one ran the script without any guides. Somebody is bound to do that, right?.

So without further ado, I present a small little extension called Remove Guides. It seems to work very well on Ubuntu 9.04 and WinXP. If you accidentally remove your guides when you didn’t want to then not to worry…just undo. Enjoy!

Are you bored? Want something to watch? How about Episode 090?

Anybody who has checked out the Screencaster’s Flickr Group will see a lot of great stuff posted there by a lot of great people – it’s up to almost 400 images with over 120 members!. Recently there was a really remarkable piece created by Gilles Pinard who has posted several other awe-inspiring works done in Inkscape. I commented to him on Flickr, but he chose (quite rightly) to respond via email since his reply was fairly lengthy.

I thought the reply might actually be very interesting for others to read, so with Gilles’ permission, I’m posting my Flickr comment along with his response right here. Thanks Gilles for such inspiring Inkscape work even if the bar is set so sky-high!

My Comment:

I can’t help but imagine you worked from a photo as reference for this. I just examined the svg file and the detail is staggering. There are so many objects just for the reflection on the chrome pieces for example. It looks like you used trace bitmap functionality for some of it and free-drawing for other parts. Care to share?

Gilles’ Reply:

Thank you for your kind comments on the Drums illustration. Yes, I do work from photographs to produce pretty much all of my drawings, often compositing elements from different pictures, and making alterations or modifications whenever it suits me. And, no, I do not use the automatic tracing feature of Inkscape. I have tried it a few times in the past, and it simply does not work to my satisfaction. First, because the tracer is unable to interpret the different parts making up an object, I end up having to manually break apart pretty much all of the objects, split their paths at selected nodes, join those endnodes with new segments, and recombine all the objects differently. This process is so cumbersome that it is simpler and faster to do things manually right from the start. Second, since the outlines are traced as “strokes converted to paths”, they are hardly usable when the time to alter their shape comes.

In fact, the method I use to replicate the contours of a photographic element should be no mystery to you, Mr. Querin, since you are the one who kindly taught us that technique in the Screencasters’ episode number sixty-nine. I learned it from you, and I have been using it ever since. Be assured that, every time I use it, a kind thought goes your way. As for the text placed on the metallic plates of the different drums, episode number eighty-eight, showing how to use the new extension to bend a path over a curved surface, arrived in a timely fashion for me and, naturally, kind thoughts were going HeathenX’s way as I was using that new feature. No, really, all the techniques used in my drawings have been learned from you two. And if I ever venture to develop some new technique of my own, I then create a short tutorial to fill the gap, so that other people could replicate the same thing, assuming they have learned what you teach in your video tutorials.

One should not be impressed by the apparent complexity of the shapes making up the miscellaneous reflections on the chromed parts of the drum set. Since those reflections are all distorted in the first place, small variations in their contours is of little consequence. So I simply draw loosely with the mouse and, voilà! I usually use {Ctrl-L} to simplify the shapes and, at times, manually adjust a few critical nodes here and there, but, by and large, the process is uncomplicated.

Episode 089 is now up. This one is kinda fun and just makes some new things with what seems like the five or six tools I have in my Inkscape toolbox.

I’m almost resigned to the fact that Heathenx will be the one who seems to break new ground with more advanced Inkscape features. Hey.. if he can’t get all the fame, girls and glory, I might as well leave him something!

With Inkscape 0.47 hopefully arriving soon, it was only a matter of time before they announced the Inkscape About Screen contest to go along with the new version. If you’re interested in showing off your mad Inkscape skillz, then head on over to (http://news.deviantart.com/article/79268/) for the rules and regs. You have to register on DeviantArt to post your entries, but it’s free.

Of course I will try to put in an entry or two, fully expecting to lose out as I have consistently done in the past.

I got Episode 088 uploaded. It’s a whopper too. This was the first time that I recorded in Ubuntu using 26fps instead of my typical 15fps. The quality of the video was much nicer but at a cost of a larger file size (215MB).  Fortunately, the FLV was smaller so if you would like to download the FLV instead of the AVI then you can grab that from our video repo at http://screencasters-repo.heathenx.org. Unless I can figure something out I’ll be moving back to 15fps with my future screencasts. I expected the file size to be a bit larger but not nearly twice as big. Of course, this was a pretty long screencast – close to 50 minutes long.

I would like to extend some thanks to Stefan for giving us the idea for this screencast and Richard for a tip on the curved text. Also, I saved myself a lot of time by using the Bezier Envelope extension written by Gerrit Karius. If you long for a better envelope effect in Inkscape then give this thing a try. It works rather well.

One of Inkscape’s developers (MenTaLguY) was interviewed on The Linux Link Tech Show last night. There was a lot of interesting conversation about Inkscape, art, graphics and open source development. Clicking on the ‘submit’ button for episode 294 over at http://tllts.org will get you a link to the mp3 file.

I’ve also noticed that a couple of the other Inkscape developers are in queue to be interviewed on Floss Weekly in an upcoming show (likely in a couple of months from now).. so keep your eyes open for that too.

Kudos to the TLLTS guys for getting him on the show. Great interview.

There is a new Inkscape tutorial website by Kendra Schaefer. Be sure to check it out.

Episode 087 is now up. It’s been a while since I’ve done a screencast. This one is the first I’ve done on the new laptop. There are a few glitches, but all in all it came out okay.

Oh yeah.. it’s kind of a blatant rip-off of one of heathenx’s earlier screencasts… but far better of course.