Bud the Teacher

    My thanks to those of you who offered help and assistance, both in public and in private, to my "friend" yesterday.  After lots of right moves down wrong roads, I thought I’d, as Stephen asked me to, share how I got from the DVD to a file that we could use in Windows Movie Maker. 
    Via the comments, I discovered Handbrake, a cool piece of software that did the ripping/encoding work that I needed.  Using Handbrake’s Windows version (which is pretty new, I guess), I was able to get the video and audio off of the DVD and into .mp4 format.  But Windows Movie Maker couldn’t work with that, so I needed to do another conversion.  I immediately thought of Zamzar, but my file was too big (Zamzar has a maximum upload size of 100 MB per file).  So I searched for, found, and installed several promising little programs.
    Since not a single one of them worked properly, or would allow me to do a full conversion without paying a fee, I’m not going to tell you which ones I found.  What I will tell you is that I eventually realized that I could use Handbrake to encode the files into smaller chunks (basically, going chapter by chapter from the DVD), which I could then upload to Zamzar and transfer to .avi. 
    Within twenty minutes of uploading an awful lot of video, I was able to download the converted files, which I then burned to a CD for my student. 
    Whew.   I rather hate video.  But, as more and more folks get into using video online on a regular basis, I have a hunch that there’ll be more universal tools out there so, hopefully, I won’t ever have a funky video experience like this again.
    (Hurry up, video software folks.)

    We were looking at wikis in Blogfolio today.  I finally had a chance to show somebody the Heavy Metal Umlaut video that I discovered in February.  The video, called a screencast by the author, Jon Udell, consists of audio played over a moving screenshot of someone else’s computer.  The short movie explains how a Wikipedia entry changes over time.  It’s a good intro to wikis.
    Movies like this are also a pretty handy way to do computer tutorials, as one can see and hear useful information at the same time. 
    Udell writes:

 

In the software world, we spend a lot of time describing how things work. To
echo Michael Kinsley’s lament about music and film, why should those
descriptions use only text, possibly augmented with screenshots? Why don’t we
present, and quote from, live experiences?

It’s way easier to do that than you might think. Tools that capture
screen video, along with voiceover, can produce compelling software
demonstrations. It’s true that many of these tools are commercial, but
some highly capable ones–including Windows Media Encoder–are free.

    I can see several uses for such technology here in my school.  Creating a screencast of how to create and use a Bloglines account would be nice.  So, too, would be a screencast showing interested individuals how to download, install and use a tool like iPodder.  How about a movie about how to use Blogger?  I’m sure you can think of other uses. 
    In this post, Udell has a screencast where he shows how to use Windows Media Encoder to make a screencast.  I don’t have time right now, but soon, I will be teaching myself how to do so.  Next up would be a good place to host those screencasts and a neat and tidy index that is user friendly.  There are services that sell this type of training, but why do we need to buy what we can make for free? (And can personalize for our unique contexts and preferences.)
    If you beat me to it, and you probably will, be sure to share your tips and ideas.