It’s a bit late, but the 4.5 version of Plasma HowTo is now available on UserBase. This is a page for people who wonder how to do things in Plasma Desktop but don’t want to read too much text. It’s also useful to direct someone to a specific animation, for example in a forum, if he/she doesn’t know how to perform a common task in Plasma Desktop. It can look like this:
Plasma HowTo - Resize Widget
The program I used to record these (read more about it here), byzanz, has also been updated. The new version improves the quality in some parts, but unfortunately some other things end up looking horrible. There seems to be a problem with colors regardless if I have composite enabled or not (example here). If you have any ideas how to fix this, please drop a message in the comments section. When the problem is solved I’ll probably redo some of the animations.
Another problem I ran into is that UserBase didn’t create any thumbnails for the GIF files, so if you land on a page looking like this you just need to click on the link under “No higher resolution available.” Again, we’re looking for a solution to this.
Anything else? Feel free to leave a comment about Plasma HowTo – feedback is much appreciated!
Who Says Penguins Can't Fly? 
October 4, 2010 at 17:33
> There seems to be a problem with colors regardless if I have composite enabled or not.
> If you have any ideas how to fix this, please drop a message in the comments section.
The problem is likely the export to GIF files. They only support 256 unique colors.
For this reason, I think it’s very valuable to have the movies in .ogg format which Free Software browsers also support natively. For other browsers, a flash applet can be provided as workarround.
October 4, 2010 at 21:46
What about animated png files? You could still keep the .gifs as a fallback solution for browsers that don’t support them.
October 5, 2010 at 1:02
@Diederik van der Boor:
Thanks for the suggestion. I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing though – if you take a look at the example in this post, it looks mostly okish but a little “grainy” because of the limit to 256 colors. Now look at this animation (added it to the main post as well). It seems like it limits itself to less than 256 colors, possibly to make the file size smaller? I tried to manually copy the background to the last frame in GIMP but it ended up looking the same.
The strange thing is that it looks fine if I start with that particular background.
Regarding .ogg that’s something I’ve thought about, but I see some problems:
To summarize, I see little benefit of ogg compared to gif, even if the latter feels like stone age. It would look a little prettier, but that’s not the most important thing about these screencasts.
@Gobnuts:
I’ve thought about that as well (and would love it), but again there are problems:
Also, recording everything twice is a bit too much work for me, unless I can find a way to convert it to both.
October 5, 2010 at 11:19
May I suggest you to use recordmydesktop to create an ogg clip, and then convert it to animated gif via mplayer and gimp.
Doing so you end with 2 useful formats.
A working proof of concept can be found here:
http://blog.ahfr.org/2008/03/making-animated-gifs-with-free-software.html
Good luck.
October 5, 2010 at 14:52
@Orestes Mas:
I will give it a try, thanks for the suggestion and link.