Experiences creating new BlogBridge screencasts

Over on our new BlogBridge site, we've been working on a new set of Screencasts. We discovered various problems with what we had done before and thought, let's try to make things better (as they say at Philips.)

I thought I'd share my stream of consciousness notes from that experience.

• Wow, those .mov files are really big. And they eat lots of bandwidth. How about hosting them on YouTube? Turns out this is fairly easy to do. Here is what they recommend you upload.

• Now if you try that on YouTube, you find that for various reasons the screen is always too small and too blurry to really work that well. Here are some of my experiments. As you can see they aren't particularly great.


• I also tried uploading some of these to Google Video, with not much better results.

Preliminary conclusion: for now, we will try to host the screencasts directly on our own web site.

Technorati Tags: screencast

Comments

[Kevin Yank]

I've spent much of this year producing video tutorials for SitePoint (http://www.sitepoint.com/videos/). After experimenting with different formats, I've found that the best compromise right now is Flash video. It runs on all major platforms, is MPEG-2 based and thus offers relatively good compression, and doesn't require any special codecs to be installed on the client (aside from the Flash player itself).