From dblank at brynmawr.edu  Mon Oct 17 00:09:57 2005
From: dblank at brynmawr.edu (dblank@brynmawr.edu)
Date: Mon Oct 17 00:10:04 2005
Subject: [Pyro-developers] Pyro Tutorial Movies
Message-ID: <51429.68.34.179.225.1129522197.squirrel@webmail.brynmawr.edu>

Pyro users and developers,

Just thought I'd let you know about a project that I've been working on
that has finally come together. I've put some Pyro Tutorial Movies showing
some basic HOWTO's on using Pyro. These desktop movies (sometimes called
"screencasts") show a computer screen and come with audio. You can see the
first couple of tests here:

http://PyroRobotics/video/

I plan to make some more of these myself, especially showing some of the
trickier components of Pyro, such as all of the user interface shortcuts,
neural network system, and config options. But I also hope that you all
might help add to the collection, too! That would include screencasts as
well as regular videos. Behaviors, assignments, and HOWTO's would be great
to have.

WARNING: these aren't professional; they aren't scripted; I basically
start talking about a narrow topic, go for 5 or 10 minutes, and stop. But,
in the spirit of wikis, open source, and the Pyro community, I thought it
be better to get these drafts out sooner than later. And we can improve on
them as time goes by.

The screencast creation process is actually quite interesting in and of
itself. The Linux-based system I'm using takes its images from a VNC
server, combines it with an MP3 audio stream, and outputs a Shockwave
Flash file. Each component is a bit complex (vnc, mp3, swf) but the most
interesting aspect is that the entire process is done in Python! I've
begun to document that process here:

http://pyrorobotics.org/?page=PyroHowtoVideo

If you have any trouble running the Flash movies, let me know. I hope that
it works across a wide array of computers.

-Doug