screencasts

UPDATED WITH BETTER TORRENT FILE LINKS

Thanks to mpare and greggles, last sunday's screencast is available via bittorrent. This lesson covers some of the fundamentals of PHPTemplate, Drupal's default theming engine, as well as how to create your own tpl.php files, override built-in functions, best practices for following the MVC standard, as well as the fine work being done as part of the Themer Pack Working Group.

Many thanks to merlinofchaos for helping out on the skype and IRC channels.

Grab the torrent here.

The screencast is now available:

http://www.zudeo.com/az-web/details/Z77GTJCGUXMHSF23Y6EM6ITI63UKZXG2.html (88 MB .mov file).

I'll be updating this post in a little while after I upload a more "raw" and higher quality version of the file.

Notes and IRC Log forthcoming...

Torrent for my high quality screencap of the Fourth Lesson is up!. The whole thing is 2:20 and about 180mb.

If you want to post a recode or other derivative, drop a link in the comments here and I'll flesh out the main node with more downloads.

After several sets of trial and error I found that the settings provided in this document have rendered desirable output for me when creating basic “screencasts.” These settings have been tested on long duration videos, in excess of 1 hour. I have had final file sizes as low as 66 MB for a video that is nearly two hours long with a final screen resolution at or near 800 x 600. Your usage and mileage may vary but these settings have proven successful for me.

Thanks to Matt Koglin of Antinomia for helping get a torrent file of my 3rd lesson together. It was a good lesson with a number of practical examples and some fun "let's watch Josh remember how to do this" moments.

Download the HD torrent now, and help seed if you can.

It's about 275MB, but the audio is clean as I did the screencap myself. I'm going to see if we can start getting our lessons hosted on the Drupal.org infrastructure, but for now this can be a great excuse for anyone who's still holding out to get torrent-savvy!

There's also a ~90mb .mov file created by mpare. Thanks!

Well the file is about 227MB, huge I know. I am working on a way to distribute these, will try a torrent when I get off work. Don't worry about being kind to my server the account ends in a few days, January 24th I think. The picture quality coming off VNC as well as the audio coming of Skype were so much better this time around. Once again this is a QuickTime *.Mov file, I'm sorry for any problems this may be causing some of you. Well after all of that if you still want the video you can click the link to download Lesson #3 From January 14, 2007!

I also now have just an audio file of the lesson if anyone wants this for notes and such.

Drupal-Dojo Lesson #2 Screen/SkypeCast

Folks, It is really big! The skype audio is not so hot at times, and there is about a minutes audio cut out, from when I got careless, but if you want it, your welcome to it. Go to http://www.parete.fatcow.com/session2.mov[dead link] to download the video. The file is huge! (~240 MB. 1hr 43min 1024 x 782 ) VNC screen did not do very well with how often the windows were switched. I think that this video is usable until the original recording can be made available.