Dane Scott chats about LearnZeta training videos
Stephen B. - December 8th, 2005
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TuneTracker Systems recently launched a new site, LearnZeta.Com (and LearnBeOS.Com), that offers Zeta / BeOS training videos on CD. I was curious about the LearnZeta videos, so I asked the man himself, Dane Scott. Read on for my mini-interview with him.
BeOSNews: What prompted the idea for making BeOS / Zeta training videos? Dane Scott: As you might be aware, I have the company TuneTracker Systems, which sells radio automation software and supplemental tools all based around BeOS/ZETA. Our TuneTracker radio customers voiced a desire to have an easy way to train new staffers…Faster and less tediously than having them study manuals. So we started out doing training CDs for our three main accessory products: TunePrepper music preparation and ripping software, Lightning audio search engine and playlist builder/editor, and TT Anywhere remote administration software. We made the CDs available individually and as a cluster of three, and they were instantly a hit with our users. When we surveyed our users, one of the most common requests was that we also do a training CD on the ins and outs of BeOS/ZETA itself. We started teaching and taping, and what we wound up with was a three-disk set.. Since this particular set of disks is so useful to the general public, we decided to sell them outright on their own learnzeta.Com and learnbeos.Com domains (both lead to the same site). BN: That’s interesting, have you found that many TuneTracker users from outside the BeOS community have been “bitten by the BeOS / Zeta bug” DS: Almost none of our customers were previously BeOS/ZETA users. We are able to attract them over because of their dire need for stability when broadcasting, combined with a set of features in our software that nobody else can touch in our price range. BN: How long did it take to create the videos? DS: The CDs were created over about four months. BN: What software was used to make the training videos? DS: We used Sony Vegas due to its offering probably the most powerful professional features for the money. BN: How much of their creation was done in BeOS / Zeta? DS: You could say that all of it and none of it was done in BeOS/ZETA. All of the demonstrating and teaching was done using BeOS/ZETA, while the filming was done using a Panasonic DVC-30 camcorder and the editing was done in Vegas, under Windows. BN: Were the videos filmed by pointing the camera at a monitor, or did you directly record the video output? DS: We looked at both approaches, and ultimately went with a flat panel LCD display and a high quality video camera. BN: Can you give us some technical details on the videos, like the resolution and audio codec used? DS: The resolution is at 720 x 480 at 30 fps, using DIVX format. BN: Were there any bizarre bugs/problems you had to work around while creating them? DS: The biggest hoop to jump through was the format hoop. There are so many different video formats to choose from, as well as different CD and DVD formats. Ultimately after quite a bit of experimentation, we chose DIVX as our encoding format for its compactness, and burned the videos to standard CDs. That gives us really good universal playability on all operating system platforms, including the three most likely; BeOS, ZETA, and Windows. BN: Do the videos contain onscreen text instructions, or are they narrated? DS: They are fully narrated, by me. In my other life, I’m a professional voice-over guy. They’re not stilted or overly-commercial sounding though. I kept everything friendly and casual and conversational. BN: Are the videos aimed at self-teachers, or at being course material for instructors? DS: Both. These will be equally appropriate for administrators/management, their staff, and of course, individual “end users” who just own BeOS or ZETA and want to get the most out of it. BN: Do you have any plans to release the videos in other formats, E.G. DVD or video-embedded-in-Flash? DS: Right now, our plans are to continue using the same format, keeping things as simple and standardized as possible so people don’t have trouble trying to view the contents. BN: Are there plans to make downloadable versions available for purchase, or would the necessary bandwidth make that impractical? DS: Right, it’d be pretty impractical due to the size of the files. The other nice thing about CDs is that in a company environment, you can pass them around easily for training purposes. BN: And lastly, are there any screenshots/samples of the videos that you could share? DS: Not yet, but very very soon! We’re planning on releasing some clips on the learnzeta.Com web site in the next few days. You might also be interested to know we plan to do a multi-disk bundle of training CDs on using TuneTracker itself. We’ve held off on doing that one because we’re coming out with a huge upgrade/update to it soon and we want to release it at or around the time it comes out. BN: Thanks again, Dane! We appreciate you taking the time to answer our questions.
yellowTab recently announced the release of an update to their VideoEditor application and they’ve made it freely available for download. The new version of VideoEditor reportedly includes many more transitions, filters, and other effects as well as more intuitive icons for the various effects than the previous version. The updated VideoEditor can be obtained from yellowTab’s Downloads page.
The BeBox Zone has posted an interesting interview with Joseph Palmer, the former director of hardware engineering at Be Inc, and Guillaume Desmarets, who was in charge of building the never-released 200MHz BeBox. The interview is a great read and Palmer relates some neat bits of information, especially the technical hurdles they had to overcome while building a prototype quad-CPU BeBox. He doesn’t mention the most intriguing question, though – where would they have put four rows of blinken-lights?
Michael Phipps of the Haiku Project has posted an update detailing what they’ve been up to for the past few months. The update also mentions that Axel D??rfler’s employment will be continued through December and it sounds like he’s already made significant progress in his month as Haiku’s first paid employee. So far he has “only” worked on multiprocessor support, CD booting support, and the app_kit.
Dockbert, an application launcher/switcher similar to the MacOS X dock, may see revived development in the near future. IsComputerOn has reported that TeamMaui are looking for a C++ coder to continue Dockbert’s development. From the details posted, they plan to clean up the settings and existing features, as well as implement some new features such as a replicant drop area and support for 128px icons. It works quite well as both a launcher and a Deskbar replacement (I’ve used it alongside Deskbar for a few years now) but it doesn’t seem to compile with newer versions of OpenTracker, so an older version appears to be required to use Dockbert on R5. Hopefully, Team Maui will be successful in finding an interested coder to update Dockbert.
BitTorrent support on BeOS is somewhat limited at the moment. There exists a BitTorrent for BeOS package with a BeThon-based GUI, but it is several years old now and doesn’t work with many new torrents/trackers. Earlier this fall, a new multi-platform BT client called Transmission was posted on BeBits – it works with most current torrent files, but is currently command line only. Bryan Varner is reportedly working on a GUI for Transmission, but in the meantime I’ve written a short guide showing how you can get most of the benefits of a GUI BitTorrent client with Transmission and Jonas Sundstr??m’s ZooKeeper. Correction: I had incorrectly attributed the in-progress Transmission GUI to looncraz, while it’s actually being developed by Bryan Varner (of the loony bin). Mea culpa, ’tis fixed now.
ZooKeeper is a handy app that lets you save a shell command and run it on files by standard GUI methods like drag-and-drop and double-clicking. I chose to use it instead of XIcon because a ZooKeeper application can be set as the preferred application for a filetype. Once you’ve downloaded the files and unzipped them, open up the ZooKeeper folder and duplicate the ZooKeeper-O file (right-click on it and click Duplicate). Re-name the copy to something like BT-opener and then double-click on the icon; this is where you configure it. There are two text fields in the window, in the one called “Comand,” enter something like the following:
The first part is pretty self-explanatory, that’s the path to the transmissioncli binary on your system. If you have the transmission folder somewhere other than /boot/apps, you’ll need to enter the appropriate path to it (E.g., After you’ve entered the command, you should enter a path in the “Working dir” field – this is the folder where files downloaded by transmission will end up. Something like Next, we’ll setup BT-opener to recognize .torrent files as a supported filetype. Right-click on the BT-opener icon, click on “Add-Ons,” then click “FileType.” Click the “Add…” button, expand the “application” category (click the triangle beside it), then click on “BitTorrent File,” and click the “Add” button (see below if the “BitTorrent File” filetype isn’t present on your system). In the same window, click the radio box beside “Multiple Launch” – you can now close the BT-opener Application Type window and save the changes when prompted. Note: If you don’t already have the BitTorrent filetype on your system, it’s quite simple to add it manually. Go into Preferences (under the BeOS/Zeta menu), and open FileTypes. Click the “Add…” button, select “application” as the group, enter “BitTorrent File” as the Type name, and enter Once BT-opener is configured to support torrent files, you can drag any downloaded torrents onto its icon and they should open in transmission in a terminal window. You can also set BT-opener as the default application to handle BitTorrent files. The easiest way to do this is to right-click on an existing torrent file and then click on “Open With”. In the Window that appears, click on BT-opener in the list and then click the “Open and Make Preferred” button. From now on, double-clicking on a torrent file should open it in BT-opener / transmission. While this setup works quite well on my system, there are still a few improvements I would like to make. My default terminal size is much larger than needed for transmission, and while I have found some tips on setting the terminal window’s size via scripts, I haven’t had any luck getting it to work with the ZooKeeper command. Also, if you have multiple terminals open via this setup, there’s no way to tell which is which – it would be nice if the filename could be echo’d in the window / title tab. And last, you don’t get much control over where the downloaded files are placed – I would like them to go into the same folder as the torrent file, but all downloads go into a single folder. If you have any ideas on how the above improvements could be made, or If you have any other improvements to suggest, please EMail me or post in the comments.
Once upon a time – around 1999-2000, specifically – I was lucky enough to find myself present during one of the more exciting periods in the history of Be Inc. and the BeOS. A big aspect that made me enjoy being a BeOS user and enthusiast in those days was the amount of activity on the great BeOS-related news sites. In addition to informing the BeOS community, we were also inspired by the enthusiasm of editors like Scot Hacker and Dane Scott.
This gradual BeOS revival – and the availability of the BeOSNews.com domain name – inspired us to create a new BeOS news site. The site is in its infancy right now, but we didn’t want to wait any longer to launch and risk missing all the cool stuff going on in the BeOS world right now. So welcome to BeOSNews.com – we hope you enjoy it and feel free to post your comments! – Jason and Stephen, aslo known as the BeDoper guys
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