Videos of KimDaBa in Action

For those of you who do not understand how to use KimDaBa, there is now no reason not to use it. KimDaBa is the first KDE application to offer small flash videos with voice-overs describing how to use it. See the tutorials at KimDaBa's video page or read on below for Jesper's description of how and why to make video tutorials of applications.

There is a sentence I hear from my users rather often: "This is exactly the software I need, I just wish I had found it a long time ago".

Now if KimDaBa is that good, why isn't everybody in the whole world using it? One reason might be its name (and I am considering renaming it to something boring but more obvious, suggestions very welcome). Another reason might be that it is different to many other photo managing applications in some ways. This is not a bug, but simply because it approaches the problem differently, which is its strength.

I've tried remedying this problem by offering a demo setup the first time people start KimDaBa, and now I'm ready with a new approach: flash videos including voice-overs that shows KimDaBa in use.

This has actually been on my wish list for years, but I never found any appropriate tool that would allow me to both record my screen action and add voice so I could explain what users are seeing.

Before I tell you how I did it, let me send a strong thank you in the direction of Rainer Endres who held a presentation on the topic at Akadamy 2006.

The tools to use are vnc2swf plus any audio editing tool, I ended up using the ahem Gnome application called Sweep. I tried for hours to get audacity working as I was told that was the best, but without success.

My work flow was the following:

1. First write down the voice-over in a text file - ensure to speak it out loud to yourself, what sounds good on paper might not sounds good when speaking.
2. Next record the audio part (That was by far the hardest part, it took me approximately an hour to record a 1 minute voice-over).
3. Following that you must record the video part. For that I created a new user, logged into the user's account, and executed: vncserver -geometry 640x480. That starts a VNC session for the user that is no larger than 640x480, which seems to be the highest to go if it should all be visible at playback time on a 1024x768 display.
4. Time to log in to the newly started server, for that I used a command similar to krdc -h localhost:1
5. Now you should be capable of seeing the new user's session in a vnc window.
6. If KDE doesn't start automatically in the VNC session, simply run export DISPLAY=:1 followed by startkde from your new user's shell.
7. Now it is time to run a command similar to vnc2swf.py -o video.vnc localhost 5901, this will bring up a dialogue where you can start and stop recording. While recording, move your mouse around as dictated in the voice-over.
8. The tricky part was that vnc2swf grabbed my audio device, so to play back the voice-over I had to convert it to mp3, and play it on my mp3 player.
9. The final step is to combine the video and audio, which is done with a command similar to: edit.py -c -o video.swf -a audio.mp3 video.vnc, that gives you a video.html file which will start video.vnc.

Now you know how to do it, no more excuses, get started recording videos for your favourite application. Well only valid excuse is that you now want to try out KimDaBa now you know how to use it.