GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 489958
Provide animations on GIMP 2.4 release notes page in a free format
Last modified: 2007-10-30 23:27:25 UTC
I have just visited the release notes page of GIMP 2.4 release to see what is new: http://gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.4.html I'm very disappointed to see that you provide some presentation animations only in closed and proprietary Flash format which doesn't work on many platforms and even not on 64-bit operating systems where Adobe still gas not released a 64-bit Flash player. Could you please provide the animations also in some open format, maybe as downloadable Ogg Theora videos, so that anyone can see these animations. Thanks
Count this comment is a duplicate of this bug. :-) (I won't needlessly file a dupe).
Agreed. Even worse, these fail to work properly with swfdec. :(
Regarding comment #2 from Peter Gordon, it runs for me runing Swfdec 0.5.1-2 runing Ubuntu Gutsy.
In addition to requiring a flash player and using proprietary formats, Google's swf-based video player doesn't come with source code. I suggest people should have totem and the totem browser plugin installed to view videos embedded in web pages. An example of how to make pages that work with totem this is here: http://www.musikboden.se/other%20projects/animated%20movies/synfig/files/page27-1020-pop.html
One more point - even with Adobe Flash(R) "enabled" browser the page in question is rather visually degraded by those ugly embedded clip thumbnails. Better option (together with providing content in some free format) would be to use some iconic movie placeholders together with links to multiple content versions. Example: http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/xshots
(In reply to comment #4) > An example of how to make pages that work with totem this is here: > http://www.musikboden.se/other%20projects/animated%20movies/synfig/files/page27-1020-pop.html It doesn't work with anything else, does it?
What's the point? It's not that people w/o a flash player would be missing anything vital. You can still get all the content on gimp.org that matters. All you are missing is some bling in the release notes. You will get over it.
Among the videos that were offered to us, two of them were also available in high-resolution MPEG format. I have changed the structure of the page and added links to these files for those who do not want to use the free swfdec decoder. I consider this bug to be closed now, although I would be glad to add links to other versions of these videos if someone wants to re-encode them (and provide hosting as well, because we cannot serve large files from www.gimp.org). 2007-10-25 Raphaël Quinet <raphael@gimp.org> * release-notes/images/2.4-video-fgselect.jpg * release-notes/images/2.4-video-perspective.jpg * release-notes/images/2.4-video-lens.jpg * release-notes/gimp-2.4.htrw * release-notes/gimp-2.4-videos.htrw: moved the embedded videos to a separate page that also offers downloads in other formats. Added thumbnail images to the main release notes, linking to the corresponding videos.
Video are needlessly "zipped" which by itself make it awkard af most if not all video player support direct download. The third video still is not available.
Hubert, if you know a better host for these videos that does not require them to be zipped before the upload, then please tell me about it so that we can link to another copy that would allow a more direct download. Regarding the third video, the Google Video version is the only one that was sent to us. But note that if you go to the Google Video page, you also have the option to download it in MPEG-4 format. So it is possible to get the video without using Flash (and these videos can be played by totem, for example). So I consider this bug closed, although any improvements are still welcome and the links will be added as soon as possible.
Update: the first two videos are now available in Ogg/Theora format.