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Contest!!! Firefox Screencasts — Sharing Knowledge through Video

9 responses

Are you getting ready to participate in the Firefox Screencasts contest?  It’s a great chance to use your talents and passion for Firefox to create screencast support videos for the Firefox Support (SUMO) knowledge base.

Starting the morning of May 19, 2008 (GMT-7) on Spread Firefox, we will present the top 100 most popular support articles from the SUMO knowledge base and ask YOU to create screencasts for one, two, three, or all of them!  You can enter as many screencasts as you like, but only one for each article please.  With 100 different articles, anyone can choose whatever article for which they would like to create a screencast.  Mozilla will not be hosting the videos during this contest, so please use a third-party application like Jing to record your screencast and send us the link so we can view it.

(Ever used Jing?  Here’s a great online demo.  Click “Video Tour” on the front page to see how to use it…it couldn’t be easier!  Just download and begin recording!)

All entries will be judged by a team who will look at the submissions and pick the best one for each of the 100 articles. That’s 100 winners!!

Judges will be evaluating each submission based on the following criteria:

  • Correctness / appropriateness of content
  • Quality of video production
  • Completeness

The 100 winners will receive a unique Firefox Screencast Contest T-shirt.  Only 100 will be made, so start thinking of your video now so you can get one of the t-shirts from this exclusive run.

Oh yeah, and there will also be one grand prize winner.  The best entry from the 100 videos will win a grand prize, which is likely to be something you can use to take more pictures and videos.  Hey, we can’t give away all the fun information just yet!

Get ready!  The contest will run from May 19 through 11:59 PM June 15, 2008 (GMT-7).  We want your submissions!

9 comments on “Contest!!! Firefox Screencasts — Sharing Knowledge through Video”

  1. myles7897 wrote on

    who are the judges?

  2. Percy wrote on

    A few questions:
    – What Firefox versions are targeted? Firefox 3 only or also Firefox 2?
    – Do they have to be in a specific OS or just any officially supported platform?
    – Do they have to include narration? Is it a plus for the “quality of video production” or it won’t affect evaluation?
    – Is it open for all languages or just English?

    Great initiative!

  3. Aleksej wrote on

    Jing seems to be propietary, and only supports Windows and Mac OS X, and records into what, Flash?

    On GNU/Linux, you can use the free/libre recordMyDesktop and its GUI front-end GTK-recordMyDesktop, which produce Ogg/Theora files.

  4. Aleksej wrote on

    There is also a Qt front-end for recordmydesktop — KrecordMyDesktop. They are all available at http://recordmydesktop.iovar.org (there are also links / descriptions for various distributions).

    I am told that there is also xvidcap for that.

  5. David Tenser wrote on

    myles7897, it hasn’t been decided yet. Stay tuned! :)

  6. David Tenser wrote on

    Percy,

    – What Firefox versions are targeted? Firefox 3 only or also Firefox 2?

    Many of the current articles are still not updated for Firefox 3, but many of them are pretty much unchanged. I think it would be helpful to most people if the videos were made with Firefox 3, but since it’s not officially out yet, it’s not a requirement for this contest. Most videos will be useful for both versions anyway.

    – Do they have to be in a specific OS or just any officially supported platform?

    Any officially supported platform would do. :)

    – Do they have to include narration? Is it a plus for the “quality of video production” or it won’t affect evaluation?

    We will not encourage narration as that adds another dimension to the videos that makes the evaluation harder, without necessarily adding much to the usefulness of the video. Also, by sticking to video only, the videos can potentially be useful to more than one locale.. See below..

    – Is it open for all languages or just English?

    Just English for the contest, or we would end up with very fuzzy judging criteria. Note, though, that the intention is for SUMO to be a global project and we would certainly support localized screencasts there, although I believe the en-US video would be very useful for most locales (LTR at least).

  7. David Tenser wrote on

    Aleksej: Yes, Jing is proprietary, which is not ideal. That said, the format, Flash, is necessary in order to ensure the videos can be played on most computers. I would love if we could use HTML5 and ogg/theora as a global, works-on-every-computer solution, but unfortunately the market is not there yet. As long as it’s Flash, we can use it in the SUMO knowledge base.

  8. Aleksej wrote on

    David Tenser: it is (I haven’t tried) possible to convert the Ogg/Theora(+Vorbis) to Flash / whatever FLV supports.

    What about providing both versions side by side?

  9. David Tenser wrote on

    Aleksej: If we can work it out technically, that could a possibility. For the target audience of SUMO, the main criteria is to make the content easily accessible, so presenting an option might just confuse.