As many of you probably already know, SUMO provides the ability to add screencasts to knowledge base articles. As part of Mozilla’s mission for an open web, we support screencasts in the Ogg Theora format, which is an open format, free of patents. Right now, most of our screencasts are only in Flash format, but we would like to have them all available in Ogg format as well.
Until now, this has been hard because it is harder to create Ogg screencasts than Flash files. Most of all, converting video files to Ogg has usually been done from the command line. A new version of VLC — the open source media player — lets you do this in a simpler way with just a few clicks.
- In VLC, go to the Media menu and select Convert/Save….
- Click Add to select the file to convert.
- After you’ve added a file, click on Convert/Save.
- Under “Settings”, select the Video – Theora + Vorbis (OGG) profile.
- Beside “Destination file”, click Browse… to choose a location and name of the OGG file.
- Click Start.
This should make it a lot easier for anyone to provide open video screencasts, allowing Firefox users to view screencasts in the knowledge base without a plugin. As always, if you have any questions, just ask in the Contributors forum.