burst_s5 - standards-compliant HTML slideshows with HTML5 video and Inkscape

burst_s5 is a collection of docutils extensions to emit S5 slideshows (based on docutils' S5 writer) with videos and slides designed in Inkscape, including appearing elements. It makes S5 presentations a little more like PowerPoint, Keynote, and OpenOffice Impress.

See a sample presentation here.

How to use it

A command, burst2s5 is installed with burst_s5. This takes care of registering the docutils directives and should otherwise be called like docutils' own rst2s5.

Docutils directives

The following docutils directives are supplied:

video

Emits html5 <video> tags. Supported:

• h264 encoded videos in MP4 container files
• theora encoded videos in Ogg container files
• both of the above in a single <video> tag

Here is an example of use:

.. class:: center

  .. video::
   :video_mp4: movie1.mp4
   :height: 400
   :loop: True

This will insert the video movie1.mp4 centered into the presentation. If the file movie1.ogv exists alongside the .mp4 file, it will also be inserted. Alternatively, if only the Ogg Video is available, use the :video_ogv: option.

inklayers

It allows you to write this in your .rst source file:

slide title
-----------

.. inklayers:: layered_graphics.svg

Instead of manually saving a bunch of layers in Inkscape and then writing this:

slide title
-----------

.. container:: animation

  .. image:: layer1.png
   :class: hidden slide-display

  .. class:: incremental hidden slide-display

    .. image:: layers12.png

    .. image:: layers123.png

  .. image:: layers1234.png
     :class: incremental

These animated images can be horizontally centered by adding this to your css:

/* center the inklayers generated content */
.inklayers { margin: auto; }

Requirements

docutils, lxml.

Inkscape (for the inklayers directive).

On Mac, Inkscape should be installed in /Applications/Inkscape.app. On others, "inkscape" should be in the path.

Installation

This is a standard Python distutils package. Install with:

python setup.py install

or whatever your usual incantation is. This will put two scripts on your path: burst2s5 and svg-images-abs2rel.

A sample presentation

For an example presentation go to samples and run:

burst2s5 --theme-url=burst-theme saturn.rst saturn.html

This will generate saturn.html, which illustrates the features of burst s5.

See the rendered version of this presentation here.

Target screen resolution

The environment variables BURST_S5_HEIGHT and BURST_S5_MAX_WIDTH control the resolution of the output.

The "standard" is a 1024x768 screen. These are the defaults. For an 800x600 screen, this seems to work:

export BURST_S5_MAX_WIDTH="795"
export BURST_S5_HEIGHT="500"

Also, you may be interested in changing output directory to support building multiple target resultions simultanously. You can set the target directory with the BURST_S5_INKLAYERS_SUFFIX environment variable.

See also

There are other interesting resources about this type of thing: http://code.google.com/p/html5media/wiki/VideoFormats