Ubuntu Videogram Screentest

Some amusing Ubuntu history for you…

A few weeks back, Matt Zimmerman — who must be aiming for a world record in “dude, you so need a blog” demands — reminded me about a bizaare video created early last year as a test for a potential Ubuntu feature, so I thought I’d share one of the stranger historical footnotes in Ubuntu’s grand repertoire of… strange historical footnotes.

In early 2005, Mark decided that he wanted to deliver a surprise, three-minute video message in the upcoming Ubuntu 5.04 “hoary hedgehog” release, so tasked me with figuring out the details. It had to be small, so it would fit on the CD, but could be delivered in any format we could play out of the box… a great opportunity to make a statement about Free formats.

To test the entire production, we needed a few minutes of test material from a DV camera to encode into Ogg Theora/Vorbis… which resulted in the aforementioned bizaare video, starring Pia and I:

While the test was mostly successful (we still had some problems with playback reliability), I don’t think Mark ever recorded the final videogram message, so we didn’t ship it with Ubuntu 5.04 “hoary hedgehog”. If it does happen to exist, it might be amusing to publish it for the interest of Ubuntu history geeks.

The idea resurfaced in May 2006, when Mark published the mysterious “Plan M” for Canonical-internal testing. You’ll know Plan M as the video included with Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, in which Nelson Mandela describes the meaning and spirit of ubuntu, the concept that inspired the project’s very name… But I might leave that story until next time.