I’m preparing a series of screencasts as part of the session at the Open Education 2007 Conference (with my co-conspirator, Rev. Jim Groom). We’re doing a two-fold presentation.
- Creation of an open education resource on early American history.
- Documentation of the processes used to build said resource, using freely available applications and services.
We gave ourselves a very simple constraint. Use only tools that don’t require access to a server, and don’t require any money. The idea being that we would be able to come up with a process that didn’t require a great deal of technical skillz, and wouldn’t require a budget to implement.
So, as part of the Documentation of Processes effort, I did a basic screencast to introduce the 3 people on the planet who don’t use WordPress to the WordPress.com interface – how to create a blog, how to create content, etc…
The screencast looks pretty darned good in the original QuickTime H.264 file. Glorious, even. I can read the scaled-down text on the web page. Exactly what I need.
But, WordPress.com won’t let me embed a .mov file, as it dutifully strips out the object/embed element if I add it. Doh. OK. Plan B. I’ll chuck it up to DivShare.com. Oh, wait. There’s still the object/embed problem, because DivShare doesn’t have a “Post to WordPress” button (it does allow posting to Facebook and del.icio.us, though…)
Plan C. Google Video. Transcoding to Flash Video. It worked, but man does Google Video (or probably more appropriately does Flash Video) ever suck the shiny out of a video. It looks like it was downsized to 320×240 and then upsized for display. Remember the video in the original Quake? Or maybe Doom? Yeah. It’s like that. Big blocky pixels. Muddy. Blurry.
But, WordPress.com will let me embed it, so that’s the version of the file that I’ll use.
The original, QuickTime video encoded in standard H.264: (original file: 10.34 MB .mov)
The fracktastic, muddy, blurry mess that got spewed out of Google Video: (transcoded file: 17.1 MB .flv)
I could live with the dramatic drop in size and quality, if the file were dramatically smaller. But it’s almost 70% BIGGER than the original file! WTF? Oh, well. At least it’s embeddable…
Did you try blip.tv?
trying it now. I’m guessing it won’t get around the wordpress.com no-embed limitation, though…
well, boy howdy! blip.tv embeds just FINE on wordpress.com! excellent! thanks for the tip, Brian!
hmm… still some nasty resizing issues, but I’ll try to figure that out…
D’Arcy, did I miss something, why not YouTube?
YouTube barfed on my source video, and would produce the same effect as Google Video – they both transcode to Flash Video. blech.
Ultimately the best format for screencasts is Flash, as in SWF and not FLV. You were right when you got to “plan C” that Google Video “suck(s) the shiny out”. In general you can get way better FLV output but it requires something like Sorenson Squeeze, and FLV is not a good screen capture format anyway. Yes, flash output is why many of us pay for Camtasia. It has THE BEST screen capture CODEC, and converting to flash allows those videos to retain their quality after conversion. Their is (still) no real equivalent commercial program for the Mac. Snapz Pro (as does the less expensive iShowU) comes the closest, but no Flash (SWF) output. So having said that, there is the interesting Jing project (jingproject.com). There is a Mac version, and as of right now it’s free!
BTW, what DID you use to get your screencast? iShowU?
And of course- the real solution- don’t expect wordpress.com to do everything-
using your own server- you can embed qt just fine.
But- the blip.tv suggestion is why I read D’Arcy Norman dot net!
Thanks Brian.
I recently began a similar project, finding ways to easily self-host embedded videos. One alternative I’m fairly impressed with is flowplayer (http://flowplayer.org/), which is a free embeddable flash-based FLV player. I used Riva FLV encoder (http://www.rivavx.com/?encoder) to transcode a movie to FLV, then embedded the movie into a WordPress post with flowplayer. You can see the result on my blog:
http://www.noshrinkwrap.com/2007/08/22/embedded-flash-video-test/
As for creating screencasts, I have to agree – Camtasia is the bee’s knees right now. I haven’t seen anything comparable on the Mac (Jing is up-and-coming, but will probably eventually be a pay service) – I’d be interested to see if anyone has a Mac equivalent to suggest, as I recently made the move to Mac myself. On the PC side, Wink (http://www.debugmode.com/wink/) is a decent freeware app that outputs to Flash, but not to AVI/QT/WMV/etc movie formats (which I occasionally use).
D’Arcy, just for comparison’s sake, you could also check out Viddler.com and Screencast.com, both of which provide embed code, and neither of which seem to muddy the original much at all.
Check out my videos at http://www.emerika.com/voe/ — I use this little known WordPress plugin called coolplayer and it’s great. I settled on flv because it works for most everyone, but cool player will let you use .mov files.
coolplayer: http://www.coolcode.cn/?p=100
You’ll like it.
Try uploading one video to http://www.tubemogul.com, it uploads it automatically to around 20 platforms (ofcourse u need to be member on all of them) saves loads of time, and some offer high quality