Scratch

Quicktime supports interactivity for the past 10 years (since v3). Maybe not as much as flash, but definitely enough to support the kinds of things you can do with scratch. In fact programs exist to build interactive quicktime movies that are similar to scratch (but not as easy to use).

To back up John here, I would have to add that for projects like this, you can't have it do everything for everybody.  While I've seen Scratch make some interesting "movies" by allowing some fairly simple animation, that is not really the target of this software.

I do find it interesting that the ease of use to make simple animations is so good that this would even be an issue at all.  That for me is a sign of outstanding basic software design principles that your team has followed, and that the design was good enough that the end-users are taking this into directions you did not originally anticipate.

Keep the focus on developing the language and don't create a swiss army knife that can also cook breakfast.

Michael_S wrote:

Roberth wrote:

To back up John here, I would have to add that for projects like this, you can't have it do everything for everybody.

Keep the focus on developing the language and don't create a swiss army knife that can also cook breakfast.

Swiss army knife ?    Give me a break.

Every other graphical / authoring / media .. whatever you want to call this type of program has an export to movie format function.


Mike

Oh, really, huh?  Does this include Visual Studio and Delphi as well?  How about "Authorware"?  I admit these are more "professional" software development suites, but they are graphical in nature and do some very powerful software.

I guess "every other" means 1 out of every 2?

I'm not trying to get a flame war here, but insisting that this becomes a priority over other fixes/extentions of Scratch, at the cost of introducing bugs.  And what file format are you suggesting that the LLK use for video output? 

Quicktime?  Have you seen the licensing requirements for commercial content generation in that format?  Are you willing to pay the licensing fees to Apple Computer?  By having Scratch as an educationally oriented project, and giving the nature and history of Steve Jobs, perhaps a special "license" could be granted by Apple just for Scratch.  But that is also a huge assumption here and not automatic.  Remember that the GPL *is* a commercial-use license... and something the Scratch team has considered.

MPEG?  Are you out of your mind?  You cannot write any open source software that implements an MPEG video codec without violating patent and licensing restrictions, or including "non-free" code mingled with the "free" code.  And the MPEG patent holders (except for MPEG-1 where most of the patents have expired) are not nearly as friendly to free software projects at all.  Any MPEG software you have seen on Linux is very likely to be illegal to use and distribute, especially in the USA.  DVD-Video in particular.

Ogg?  Yes, this format *is* free to use, but hardly anybody makes devices (or software) that use it.  This file format is growing and may still get mindshare, but there is a long way to go.

The point I'm making here is that making video conversions is a legal minefield that is better left alone unless you have an "expert" guide to help you out.  This is but one of the reasons why open source video editing solutions tend to be a piece of garbage compared to commercial offerings.  Paying a 1% royalty usually isn't that big of a deal on commercial projects.  If Scratch is to remain free, video might have to be left out.

We've added the question to the FAQ page here:
http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=1997#p1997

We will continue to think about exporting features.  Thanks for the suggestions.