Scribl: simple instructional videos

Scribl is a program for creating simple instructional videos. There are plenty of fancy programs out there for making beautiful animations -- this is not one of them. It only aims to be an improvement (both in terms of output quality and creation effort) over the venerable doc-cam + microphone method for creating video lectures.

A sample

Here's a short video created with scribl:

Here's a screenshot of its user interface:

This is BETA software.

It is unlikely to work on your computer, particularly if your computer is not running linux. If it does run, there is a chance it will crash and eat your hard work.

How to run

Because scribl is still beta, in order to run it you will need to compile it yourself. Scribl is written in the rust programming language, so first you'll need to install a rust compiler. Then you'll need to install some dependencies (because although rust manages rust-written dependencies very easily, scribl also depends on some software written in C). If you're running linux, you'll need to install (if you don't have them already) development packages for

• GTK+-3
• pango
• gstreamer
• alsa
• atk

You might need install some gstreamer plugins (at least vp9enc and webmmux), because Scribl uses gstreamer for encoding videos. (If you're on linux, it should be enough to install a package with a name similar to gstreamer1.0-plugins-good.)

Once your rust compiler and gstreamer plugins are ready, you should be able to run Scribl by cloning this git repository, opening it in a terminal, and typing cargo run --release.