New Creative Vado HD software Movie creation has been removed

Posted on by primaryt

So, I’m waiting on confirmation for this but it looks like the team at Creative have removed the ability to make edited movies/videos from within the Vado Central software on the latest Creative Vado HD cameras.  

What does this mean in real terms for a teacher?  No ability to put on text before or after your video footage & no ability to add nice themes to your video.  The software on the Vado was probably one of the most impressive things about it, now they have destroyed that I’m not so sure how I feel about the plucky plastic video snapper.

This is a very bad decision. What are Creative thinking? They also made the buttons less obvious they have been pressed too making the device slightly less accessible for early years children.

This is the old camera that does support making a movie.   The new version looks like a chav’d up renault 5.

Old version:

New version:

Etherpad Office Import & Export after Upgrade to V1

Posted on by primaryt

V1 does not natively support office import / exports yet due to a licensing issue but if you had it working before you can do a few steps that will get you started.  We use Open Office in a headless mode to accomplish this.

1.  Copy the cos.jar to infrastructure/lib (replacing etherpadbackup is the folder you backed your original etherpad installation to (etherpad <v1)

cp /usr/local/etherpadbackup/trunk/infrastructure/lib/cos.jar /usr/share/etherpad/infrastructure/lib/

2. Run soffice in headless mode

/usr/bin/soffice -headless -nofirststartwizard -accept=”socket,host=localhost,port=8100;urp;StarOffice.Service”


3. Uncomment the lines in execution.scala that are commented “REMOVED_COS_OF_COS”

4. Reset your exports 

export JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun"
export SCALA_HOME="/usr/share/java"
export JAVA="/usr/bin/java"
export SCALA="/usr/bin/scala"
export PATH="/usr/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH"
export MYSQL_CONNECTOR_JAR="/usr/share/java/mysql-connector-java-5.1.10.jar"

4. Rebuild and Run.

cd /usr/share/etherpad/etherpad/
bin/rebuildjar.sh clearcache
/etc/init.d/etherpad stop
/etc/init.d/etherpad start
Note, in your etherpad.properties.local you should have the line:
etherpad.soffice = /usr/bin/soffice
It is important so don’t forget it.