© 2004
Canonical Ltd.
•
Terms of use
•
Data privacy
•
Contact Launchpad Support
•
Blog
•
Careers
•
System status
•
35a32c5
(Get the code!)
I also don't believe there is any major reason for moving away from Drupal. All the necessary functionality is in Drupal already, including the RSS feeds which are in use in various places such as Miro.
Emma spent some time creating a fresh new look for the site (also on Drupal) which you can see here:-
http://
The reason the sign up / register page is missing is because there was no need for it to be there. Initially it was there and people could comment on videos. Most of the comments fell into one of four categories:-
* Spam (which is less of an issue in newer versions of Drupal)
* 'Thanks for this video'
* Technical support questions which don't belong on a screencast site
* Questions regarding when new videos would be available :S
The main intention of the screencasts site was to create original content, not just link to existing youtube videos. I wanted to encourage people to make high quality informative videos for Ubuntu. I didn't want to have a load of links to external sites and videos for numerous reasons:-
* We don't control the content so can't control the quality of those submitted videos
* Linking to youtube (for example) videos doesn't give the user the ability to download the videos using RSS (easily)
* Videos are not downloadable from youtube in a format which Ubuntu can play out of the box
* We are unable to put subtitles (and thus translated subtitles) on 3rd party youtube video sites.
I thus selected blip.tv simply because they will host and serve up .ogv files as well as flash and other formats suitable for other platforms. They can do the RSS feeds well. Before I uploaded anything to blip.tv the amount of work that I put in to make _one_ screencast available was tremendous. From the recording and editing to the video encoding and uploading multiple versions, and page creation. it's a very time consuming process. Using blip.tv removed the encoding, uploading of multiple versions and page creation. However it's not perfect, at the moment it's just a big flash blob. I'm working on that.
Whilst I am not dismissing linking to other videos on the site, I'd rather it wasn't the main focus. The big issue is getting people to create high quality screencasts for the team.
I have spent a little time updating some of the screencast pages on the wiki to tidy them up and have them make more sense. I still have many more pages to update/revise, and have also been tinkering with the drupal site behind the scenes.