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Any thoughts on Video Documenting Wiki articles for Youtube?

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Any thoughts on Video Documenting Wiki articles for Youtube?

Postby japreja » Tue Jun 23, 2015 10:11 pm

Hi all,

I am trying to go through the wiki howto articles for the Development, 3D Modeling, and FDM Modeling for FG aircraft and scenery. Some articles would make some decent Videos for YouTube if the videos are kept fairly short. I have noticed that there are very few YouTube videos specific to FlightGear regarding development and/or why you should/shouldn't do this/that.

Does FlightGear have a YouTube channel?
Do the Core/FDM/3D devs have an interest in recording certain processes while they work on various code sections explaining what is being done with it and why, for educational purposes or to show recommended practices for contributing to FG?

I would think it would be easier to just hit record on a screen capture program and talk your way through certain processes as opposed to taking the extra time to write a wiki article. The wiki article could be made based off the video by another user.

Would recording speedup/slowdown the documentation/development process?
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Re: Any thoughts on Video Documenting Wiki articles for Yout

Postby Hooray » Tue Jun 23, 2015 10:53 pm

great idea, but I would probably start with documenting how to use the wiki, i.e. editing/creating articles or even just contributing to the newsletter. Those are topics that have a fairly low barrier to entry, and it would help all of us to have more wiki contributors. Like you say, there are other topics that may be of interest to developers, but first of all, I'd try to cover the very basics, such as using the wiki, using the manual, and basic FG installation/setup stuff - and I'd probably focus on non-coding stuff, people actually interested in coding, are least likely to benefit from annotated videos, because coding is not such a visual process - and the coding tools in FG are also not particularly visual either.

So overall, I'd say go for it - and see how it works out. Once you have completed 2-3 short videos to see if/how well they work, you could probably focus on some of the more popular wiki articles (as per the wiki stats), e.g. the multiplayer stuff or configuring joystick peripherals.

From my standpoint, anything that helps lower the barrier for new end users would be great to have, especially if it can help address long-standing support issues (think AMD/ATI or Intel GPU issues). Equally, multi-screen setups might be of interest to many. So creating a corresponding youtube channel sounds like a great idea to me, and I would suggest to come up with maybe 1-2 new videos per month and add those to the corresponding newsletter, while conducting a poll on the forum for future topics to be covered - maybe you could even look up people who've previously created FG related youtube videos and get them involved to help with capturing/editing, translating, promotion etc ?
Please don't send support requests by PM, instead post your questions on the forum so that all users can contribute and benefit
Thanks & all the best,
Hooray
Help write next month's newsletter !
pui2canvas | MapStructure | Canvas Development | Programming resources
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Re: Any thoughts on Video Documenting Wiki articles for Yout

Postby elgaton » Tue Jun 23, 2015 11:18 pm

japreja wrote in Tue Jun 23, 2015 10:11 pm:Does FlightGear have a YouTube channel?

Yes. There are also some unofficial channels featuring tutorials and HOWTOs - see especially the videos shot by osjcag several years ago.

japreja wrote in Tue Jun 23, 2015 10:11 pm:I would think it would be easier to just hit record on a screen capture program and talk your way through certain processes as opposed to taking the extra time to write a wiki article. The wiki article could be made based off the video by another user.

Nice idea - I've got some suggestions:
  1. prepare a script in advance;
  2. it would be a nice touch to add closed captions (in case the people watching the video don't speak English as their first language);
  3. keep in mind that video documentation is not meant to replace the wiki article entirely (e.g. people on slow connections might not be able to watch it, or to watch it with difficulty; others might have a limited oral comprehension of the English language; the video might make references to technical material such as command line switches...).

I'd say, as Hooray suggested, to start with two/three videos related to performing common tasks (the ones you can find in the User Portal of the wiki) and see how it goes.
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Re: Any thoughts on Video Documenting Wiki articles for Yout

Postby japreja » Wed Jun 24, 2015 6:30 am

Well, I am interested in making some videos on my own, but I prefer to have some help with this. For a few reasons...

I am fairly new to flightgear, so verifying that a wiki article is current currently is imposible for me at the moment simply because I really don't know. I've tried following a few of the howto's but they didn't work, most likely because FG has changed a bit since 2013 when the articles were written.

I am not realy too interested in showing people how to install FG, but more to create/add/improve aircraft by improving 3D meshes and learning about FDM. Even that is somewhat dificult because there is no single page that describes all the XML tags and how/when they should be used. Althought there are a few tags listed. Likewise there is no page listing all the current parameters FG supports by default.

Then there is the super build instructions page that might need updating, they point git to gitorious but I thought FG changed to sourceforge.net, all my attempts with gitorious have failed and I am in the process of trying to get the sources by replacing the gitorious steps with sf.net links to see how that goes in another thread.

Since there is going to be a new release, more will be changing. I will see how things turn out in the next few weeks.

In the mean time I can make a video on "how to make a video and process it with Blender to get frames extracted for wiki articles". I'll take a few days to see if I can get it working in a VM so the workspace looks cleaner.

@elgaton
Thanks for the information on Closed Captioning, I've tried finding information on this in the past without success. And exactly as you noted I completly understand the slow connection problems with video, I am on a fairly slow connection myself. But even those of us on slow connections can download videos for later viewing using FireFox plugins (Flash Video Downloader). Or just find a fast public wifi access point to grab a few videos to watch later.
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Re: Any thoughts on Video Documenting Wiki articles for Yout

Postby japreja » Sat Jul 11, 2015 11:04 pm

I am going to procede with this, I spent the past week, or so, trying to get a Virtual machine installed on my system. I have had no success at all, even the Windows VM crashes my system. So... I removed all VM's from my system and will wait for the 3.6.0 version of FG to come out.

I am still trying to cleanup my system because I have about 400Gb of space taken up by programs I never realy use. I got rid of CamStudio since it is fairly old and doesn't look like it is maintained anymore, I will be using OBS MultiPlatform as recomended by other users here on the forum. I am quite impressed with this screen recorder, but I don't like how there are no options to highlight the mouse, different clicks, and scroll wheel. I'll use it anyways simply because I have 100% clean audio with it and it is loud and clear :D pluss you can stream live directly to youtube or a veriaty of other streaming sites.

The first video I will make will be Installing FG 3.6.0 (when it comes out). Second, how to install, use, and record with OBS Multiplatform, mainly because it would be nice to see more users stream live FG events to youtube. My youtube account does not have time limits of 20 minutes that most accounts have simply because I never posted duplicate content. I will take advantage of this :) since, apparently, I am allowed to stream unlimited live events as well. If that goes OK, I will create a new channel that will be dedicated to FG videos, if I can. I will try out FG's MP feature and see how well my PC can handle streaming live from it. This will not go so well simply because my slow internet connection. I will see if my local library will alow me to lug in my PC to use their 50 Megabit connection once per month in the meeting room :wink: but thats not something I can promise since it is ultimately up to them.

My videos will be Windows 7, maybe Windows 10, Specific so I would recomend others on different platforms replicate any of the videos that have some sort of platform dependancy. When Windows 10 is available as an upgrade, I will determine if I should revert back to Linux. Although, I have not used linux since SuSE 6.5 :shock: the tools I was familiar with are still available. :D .
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Re: Any thoughts on Video Documenting Wiki articles for Yout

Postby wkitty42 » Sun Jul 12, 2015 4:34 am

not trying to evangelize but you really should look into a *nix system and forget all about those incessant winwhatever problems... we've converted well over 500 machines from winwhatever over the last 10 years and have never looked back... the worst problem has been finding certain software to do the same tasks that were done before but in 98% of the cases, it really took moving to existing generic software that did the same thing and tossing in a little bit of retraining... we have not found anyone that has regretted the switch after they have had sufficient time to get acquainted and retrained...
"You get more air close to the ground," said Angalo. "I read that in a book. You get lots of air low down, and not much when you go up."
"Why not?" said Gurder.
"Dunno. It's frightened of heights, I guess."
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Re: Any thoughts on Video Documenting Wiki articles for Yout

Postby japreja » Sun Jul 12, 2015 6:32 am

@wkitty
I don't feel at all that this is a windows problem. In reality it is not, it is a misconception that *nux developers (who have never touched valid licensed windows in recent years) think they need to alter things just to suit windows users/developers. As long as it compiles with gcc, g++, nasm, etc... it will build fine on mingw/msys without needing to be altered. All current versions of code of the build systems, gcc, make, binutils, etc.. all are broken now because they want to avoid gcc and use Visual Studio build tools which isn't realy necessary and usualy breaks the code.

I had all gnu packages built on windows with mingw/msys and binutils wihtout any problems aside from older versions. They would not build flightgear, because they were outdated, so I deleted my instalation and downloaded the most recent versions only to find all this out. It should have worked but some coder, between now and when I was able to compile with msys cleanly, decided they would fix things that were not broken.

The only way I can get the build utilities compiled back for my sytem is to switch to linux, cross compile, make an installer for those build tools, then reinstall Windows and try again. A big pain for absolutely no reason at all aside from someone thinking they should trust wine, which is an invalid, and most likely pirated copy of Windows. It's no wonder why things don't work as they used to.
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Re: Any thoughts on Video Documenting Wiki articles for Yout

Postby rico001 » Tue Dec 01, 2015 6:50 pm

I had extreme troubles with virtualbox as I had to keep updating/reinstalling it eventually quit working on my machine and I didn't like how it used network drivers.

I have got qemu 2.40 for Windows working ok using batch files and command-line options exept still trying to figure out/work out using virtualbox's video driver addons in qemu, will have to continue to look into 3D video acceleration/vga passthrough if available.
Didn't like the idea of paying
using a command like: chdir /d "C:\Program Files\qemu" to set the working directory It plays nice with other programs.
(maybe we could start a thread about this in offtopic )

Maybe we should have an official youtube channel for flightgear and could have a bunch of groups of types of videos?

japreja wrote in Sat Jul 11, 2015 11:04 pm:I am going to procede with this, I spent the past week, or so, trying to get a Virtual machine installed on my system. I have had no success at all, even the Windows VM crashes my system. So... I removed all VM's from my system and will wait for the 3.6.0 version of FG to come out.

I am still trying to cleanup my system because I have about 400Gb of space taken up by programs I never realy use. I got rid of CamStudio since it is fairly old and doesn't look like it is maintained anymore, I will be using OBS MultiPlatform as recomended by other users here on the forum. I am quite impressed with this screen recorder, but I don't like how there are no options to highlight the mouse, different clicks, and scroll wheel. I'll use it anyways simply because I have 100% clean audio with it and it is loud and clear :D pluss you can stream live directly to youtube or a veriaty of other streaming sites.
....
Unofficial flightgear portable 1.0 windows 32-bit gpl2
https://sourceforge.net/projects/flight ... -portable/
A FlightGear Newsletter: https://wiki.flightgear.org/FlightGear_ ... tober_2023
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