Present Perfect

(For the lazy or impatient, eycandy links at the bottom)

Weeks like this are hard. For some reason, I can't get to bed when I want to and end up getting up a few times and trying to go back to sleep. For some reason my head keeps spinning and I keep thinking about stuff that needs doing. This week was supposed to be a week with a little more focus on Elisa, and while I assisted in some discussions, I have not been able to do much yet. Every day it seemed there was some problem with something someone was doing that needed some assistance, or a bunch of meetings to be in.

Days like those that sap my energy and consume my time without really allowing me to make progress on my TODO list are black karma. So I try to offset them by increasing my white karma, trying to help out someone else to do something. I was feeling guilty of never being able to sit down with Phillipe and figure out his needs for the new Elisa website, so when I finally got back to my disk after meeting X I saw the following on IRC:
<philn> MikeS: is it easy to do screencasting with flumotion? because i need to make a new one for elisa

I have been wondering the same thing and thinking it should be easy, but never got round to trying it. And lately I've been wanting to do screencasts of some of my projects, like Flumotion and moap. While I hope Istanbul will work for me sometime in the future, I am not entirely sure it is a good approach for screencasting Elisa, because Istanbul encodes to Theora on the same machine, so it would not leave much CPU to show off the fancy Elisa effects.

So I decided to give it my best shot and stay at work until I got this working.

So, the first step was simple enough. Remember how GStreamer has this crack gst-launch command that we advocate as being useful for prototyping, but that people keep treating as a real player application and spawn it from other programs ? Havoc used to poke fun at blog posts saying "See how easy it is to do stuff with GStreamer ? This pipeline walks your dog and fills up your fridge" and then some random hodgepodge of characters, slashes, numbers and exclamation marks.

Well, good news - flumotion has the same insanity ! There is flumotion-inspect to tell you what components there are, and there is flumotion-launch to launch flumotion flows for rapid prototyping. (And yes, on our side, we still really mean "rapid prototyping".)

So, first stab:

flumotion-launch -d 4 pipeline-producer pipeline="ximagesrc" ! theora-encoder ! ogg-muxer ! disk-consumer directory=`pwd`


Well, that starts up, does stuff, then quickly consumes a lot of CPU. When I stop it, I have a file in my local directory that plays back my desktop. Most players crash on it because XVideo doesn't like 1600x1050 videos. So let's limit the size a little.


flumotion-launch -d 4 pipeline-producer pipeline="ximagesrc endx=800 endy=600" ! theora-encoder ! ogg-muxer ! disk-consumer directory=`pwd`


OK, that gives me a video of the size I want, and works reasonably well. At this point we are still running on only one machine though. That means that our machine is doing the theora encoding, which is a heavy load to carry. flumotion-launch is only for prototyping, and doesn't have a way of distributing components across machines.

So, next step. I take a spare machine in the office which will do theora encoding for me. I start a manager on it, and a worker.
I connect to the spare machine from my own machine using flumotion-admin, and the wizard pops up. I go through the wizard, choosing the videotest producer for video, and the soundcard for audio. I pick Theora bitrate settings, and choose to save the stream to disk instead of streaming it. At the end, I export the configuration to disk, and I start editing it.

There are three things I need to do. For the components that I want to run on my own desktop, I set the worker name to "producer". For the others, I leave the worker name to what it was. The second thing I need to do is replace the videotest-producer section with the pipeline producer component. And the third thing I need to do is to start a worker on my local desktop with the name set to "producer", and make it connect to the remote manager.

After this, I stop the flow in the admin client, clean out all components, and load the new configuration. The flow starts up, and all components turn happy. My memory usage is increasing steadily and then dropping again. Something is probably up, and in the latest version of Flumotion I have some additional things I can look at to help me find problems. I can look at the video-producer component, which is producing a raw video feed, and see if the next component (the encoder) connecting to it over the network is losing any buffers. And yes, as expected, every so often it drops 450 buffers, which is what happens in Flumotion if a component further down the flow doesn't read fast enough.

So, how do I speed things up ? There are three things I can do. I can reduce the framerate, but I would like to show the fluid animations. I can reduce the size a little, so I change to 640x480. But a good reduction in bandwidth can be achieved by already converting the image format in the producer component from raw RGB to I420, a different colorspace that Theora will use anyway and uses less bytes per frame.

Making these changes allowed me to do a reasonably good capture without dropping too much frames. The only problem is, I'm still doing a screencast of the top left part of my desktop. I just want to screencast the Elisa application and nothing else. Here's where I cheated a little - I started offsetting the ximagesrc coordinates to make sure the capture fell inside the Elisa application window. This makes it look like it runs fullscreen.

So, reload config, restart flow, start Elisa, and do some stuff in it. This is my first screencast, and I was focusing on how to make a screencast, not what to show off in a screencast. I'm sure Philippe will do a better job tomorrow if he wants to give this a try.

So without further ado, here is a link to the Elisa screencast (using Cortado to watch it), or a link to a playlist to open in a player, or a link to the Ogg file directly.

And here is the Flumotion config file.

Bug I noticed in Flumotion when trying this: having the manager on the producer machine confused the worker on the encoder machine.

Bugs in Elisa I noticed: Elisa doesn't think my Ogg video files are in fact video, playing a folder of images when playing music makes Elisa stop accepting input events.

Todo for Flumotion: add screencasting to the scenario.

By the way, Philippe will be talking about Elisa at FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium, this weekend, so if you are there, be sure to catch your dose of eyecandy. I will be there as well, as will Edward, Andy and Florian.

Mission accomplished, 23:07, time to go home.

(For the lazy or impatient, eycandy links at the bottom) Weeks like this are hard. For some reason, I can't get to bed when I want to and end up...