Miskatonic University Press

How to install Zotero 7 on Windows

zotero

I didn’t see any short videos showing how to install Zotero 7 on Windows, so I made one: How to install Zotero 7 on Windows. There are a lot of great videos out there showing how to install and use Zotero (mostly done by librarians) but they’re longer and cover much more than just the installation. I was after something quick I can send out before a Zotero workshop.

Here it is at the Internet Archive. It is licensed with a CC BY 4.0 license, so you can use, share and adapt it, but must give credit.

Video on Internet Archive

It shows just the basics in 05:40 and I hope it’s useful to others. It could be better, and if I redo it I’ll record the audio using a proper microphone, but it’s good enough for next week, which is when I need it.

I wish there was one like this for Macs …

Technical details

For my future reference, here’s how I did it.

I run Ubuntu, so I needed a Windows machine. Library IT loaned me a clean Windows laptop with some basic applications installed but that wasn’t locked down. I installed OBS and used that to record the video. It took a few takes, of course, but I ended up with a recording that was good except for some stuff at the beginning and a short chunk in the middle.

I avoid handling video and I have almost no experience with any editor, so I fell back on the magnificently powerful and arcane command line program ffmpeg. You can do pretty much anything with audio or video with ffmpeg, but by Jove, its incantations can be complex.

From OBS I had saved a video named zotero-on-windows-raw.mkv (the suffix means it uses the Mastroska format, but don’t ask me about video containers). To pull out the two sections I wanted, I ran this to extract them into two new files. -ss means “start at this timestamp” and -to means “go up to this timestamp.”

ffmpeg -i zotero-on-windows-raw.mkv -ss 00:48 -to 05:39 zotero-1.mkv
ffmpeg -i zotero-on-windows-raw.mkv -ss 06:12 -to 07:01 zotero-2.mkv

To combine them, first I made demux-list.txt:

file './zotero-1.mkv'
file './zotero-2.mkv'

Then I combined the two videos into one with:

ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i demux-list.txt -c copy zotero-combined.mkv

There’s probably some way to tell ffmpeg to do all this with one command but this worked.

With the video ready, I made a .srt SubRip subtitles file, and refined it until I was happy. I ran this to watch the video with the captions:

vlc zotero-combined.mkv --sub-file zotero.srt

The subtitles file looks like this:

1
00:00:01 --> 00:00:05
This short video will show how to install Zotero on a Windows computer,

2
00:00:05 --> 00:00:08
and how to connect it with three web browsers:

3
00:00:08 --> 00:00:12
Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.

I looked at Sacha Chua’s subed Emacs mode, but it seemed like too much to be getting into for this simple demonstration. Maybe next time.

The audio track needed work but in the end I decided to leave it as is.

Finally, I wanted to “burn” the subtitles into the video so they would always show. This is supposed to work but didn’t:

ffmpeg -i zotero-combined.mkv -vf subtitles=zotero.srt zotero-with-subtitles.mkv

No matter what I tried it would give errors like this:

Parsed_subtitles_0 @ 0x6174c4ac0e80] Unable to open zotero.srt
[AVFilterGraph @ 0x6174c4abf840] Error initializing filters
[vost#0:0/libx264 @ 0x6174c4acd080] Error initializing a simple filtergraph
Error opening output file zotero-with-subtitles.mkv
Error opening output files: Invalid data found when processing input

I tried all sorts of things, including converting the video to other formats and turning the subtitles into the .ass format, which is a real thing. (Whether ffmpeg had been compiled --with-libass needed to be checked.) Nothing worked. I thought perhaps it was a character encoding problem, so I added a smiley emoji so the file would be seen as UTF-8, but that didn’t help. I even installed Kdenlive, a video editor, but it couldn’t handle the SRT file. It’s a mystery.

Happily, I found this answer on Stack Overflow about mkvmerge and it worked perfectly:

sudo apt install mkvtoolnix
mkvmerge -o zotero-combined-subtitled.mkv zotero-combined.mkv zotero.srt

Lastly, I tweaked the metadata a bit:

ffmpeg -i zotero-combined-subtitled.mkv -metadata title="How to install Zotero 7 on Windows" -metadata language="en" -c copy zotero-7-how-to-install-on-windows.mkv

And with that it was ready. Next time I’ll try a graphical video editor. Many thanks to everyone who understands video and makes these tools to handle it!