This week we make a green screen webcam, mention upcoming laptop reviews from Entroware and Dell and reveal an Entroware laptop competition is coming soon. Then we discuss the death of the Linux desktop, this weeks command line love is using ffmpeg to create “high quality” animated .gifs and we go over your feedback.

It’s Season Ten Episode Eighteen of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.

In this week’s show:

  • We discuss what we’ve been upto recently:
  • Martin has been making a green screen backdrop for Google Hangouts using a Magewell USB Capture HDMI Gen 2 and Open Broadcaster Software.
  • Mark has been playing with a Dell Precision 5520 and preparing his review.
  • Alan has received an Entroware Apollo laptop to review and for us to give away as a competition prize.

  • We discuss the death of the Linux desktop.

  • We share a command line lurve:

  • ffmpeg – Converting videos to “high quality” animated .gif images.

Generate a palette

ffmpeg -y -i input.mp4 -vf fps=15,scale=448:-1:flags=lanczos,palettegen palette.png

Output the GIF using the palette

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -i palette.png -filter_complex "fps=15,scale=448:-1:flags=lanczos[x];[x][1:v]paletteuse" output.gif
  • And we go over all your amazing feedback – thanks for sending it – please keep sending it!

  • This weeks cover image is taken from Wikimedia.

That’s all for this week! If there’s a topic you’d like us to discuss, or you have any feedback on previous shows, please send your comments and suggestions to [email protected] or Tweet us or Comment on our Facebook page or comment on our Google+ page or comment on our sub-Reddit.


3 Comments » for S10E18 – Piquant Abnormal Yard
  1. daniel66,666 says:

    My last 3 gui-based apps I installed are Baobab, Minecraft, and micropolis-java — so yeah 2 out of 3, I would say Java is the superior development platform. (Bonus points for Qt-based crypto wallets as well.)

  2. nadrimajstor says:

    Take a good chunk of Mozilla’s Servo, use WebAssembly as a bridge to make it language agnostic and beat Electron in it’s own game?

  3. Jason Smith says:

    First of all, a shout out to Ubuntu Martin! Solid.

    The arguments against Electron (and nwjs) are similar to arguments against Java. They are too fat and non-native. But both are free and produce usable applications that work well on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Moreover, with Electron I can target web and phone apps (Cordova) without duplication of effort. Electron is very compelling if I want to reach a broad audience without a huge development team and budget.

    On the dearth of new native applications: Is there anyone out there organizing efforts based on identified needs? If one wished to get involved with organized Gnome or KDE native desktop apps (or other desktops), where would one go to get started?