And He Blogs

The world of video sharing websites is changing rapidly. YouTube and its competitors are trying to distinguish themselves by constantly improving their services, so we should see great progress in terms of quality of video and features that these sites offer. My recent quest has been to find the best options for hosted screencasts. The makers of my screencasting tool of choice, Camtasia, offer a (pay) service to host the videos at a site called screencast.com. Here you can host the higher quality, and higher resolution (larger), SWF files that really make screencasts look their best. You also can host those high quality screencasts on your own hosting service, provided you have that little extra know how to get them up and streaming. There is an SWF version of the screencast represented in the above photo available.

The latest version of Camtasia also gives the option of outputting a blog-friendly version of the screencast that works well for embedding into a blog post. However, if you want to give your screencasts a wider audience, you may want to consider YouTube or other video sharing services. Here are a few things you should know about sharing your screencasts online.

The Secret High-Quality YouTube Hack

This really isn’t a secret any more, but YouTube is experimenting with higher quality videos. YouTube announced that it would offer higher quality versions of video, one reason being so that they can accommodate the Apple iPhone and Apple TV, which don’t play Flash video. The video format that is used is a variant of MPEG-4 known as h.264. Adobe recently upgraded their Flash player to play h.264 video in addition to Flash video (FLV). The h.264 versions of the video will give the Apple TV users a more TV friendly experience because it is higher resolution.

To see the higher quality version videos on YouTube you need to add an extra little bit of text to the URL of a YouTube video. Whatever the URL is, add &fmt=18 to the end of the URL. If that doesn’t work, you can try &fmt=6. To see the screencast represented by the photo above at high quality resolution, go to:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=O-W-3OIrJKg&fmt=18

Compare that with the low quality version that is located by using the traditional URL (without the &fmt=18):

http://youtube.com/watch?v=O-W-3OIrJKg

The obvious benefit to the high quality version is that the text is much sharper. The downside is that it will take longer to download to a user’s machine (it’s roughly twice the size). You also lose a bit of the “instant seeking” ability. With a standard YouTube video (the Flash version) you can start watching at any point by moving the play head to the position that you wish. You won’t be able to do that with the h.264 version until it downloads entirely to your computer.

You can click on the images below to compare side-by-side screenshots.

Other Video Sharing Sites

I experimented superficially with some other video sharing sites, and I can recommend two that give good quality encoding of screencasts. One is Blip.tv, which is my personal favorite video sharing/TV channel service. Blip.tv’s selling point, besides the myriad of options to publish, cross-post, distribute, advertise, etc., is that they use the higher quality On2 codec for Flash video. I can also customize a player to match a given blog, and maximize the window to fit in the space that a given WordPress theme provides.

The other site that impressed me was Vimeo. This is one of the first sites to offer HD Flash video, and while I didn’t try to upload the video at HD resolutions, the video quality is quite good at the standard setting. You also can view the video full screen and while the artifacts of compression are more noticeable, you get an acceptable quality video to watch. Blip.tv has the full screen capability as well, but I couldn’t get it to work when I embedded the video in a blog post. Lots more testing yet to do, but so far some cool things out there to report. More to come.

Here is the Blip.tv version:

Here is the Vimeo version:

Install Flickr Photo Gallery Plugin in UMWBlogs from Andy Rush on Vimeo.

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This one comes via the Tubetorial site (which has a definite "monitize it" theme). As the video demonstrates, there is now a Revver plugin for WordPress. What are the advantages of Revver over something like YouTube? Well, for one thing, you can make money from your videos. The second advantage is that the video quality is superior to what you’ll get with YouTube. The screencast in the above video looks great.

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As I promised in my screencast on Embedding (live) YouTube Videos In PowerPoint, here is a video demonstrating how to download a video from YouTube, convert it, and insert it into a PowerPoint slide. I’ll be using my old friend Riva FLV Encoder to convert the downloaded FLV into an MPEG1 video file. This is a format that is compatible with the insert video function in PowerPoint. You cannot directly embed an FLV file in PowerPoint (maybe someday?), at least not easily.

It’s a little less than 10 minutes, and the main video is about an 8MB download. So without further delay, here is the screencast entitled Embed YouTube Video in PowerPoint Offline .

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It’s the start of a new semester and that means that the senior seminars get under way. Those classes are designated “speaking intensive”, and so they will have a presentation component to them. One of the popular questions I get asked is how do I embed video in my presentation. Well, you certainly can insert a video that you have already on your hard drive, but with YouTube being such a popular resource, I thought I’d share a screencast about embedding YouTube videos in a PowerPoint 2007 slide. There is also a YouTube video for doing the same thing in PowerPoint 2000/2003. Keep in mind that these techniques require a live connection to the Internet, otherwise your slide will be blank.

UPDATE: People have been reporting that there is no “Custom” field any more that calls up the Movie URL dialog box. Well don’t worry about that. Just place the modified YouTube URL in the “Movie” field in the main “Properties” dialog window. I need to update the video to reflect that.

One further note is that a similar technique is used if you want to embed a Flash animation (a .swf file). Check out the Inserting Flash Movies Into PowerPoint screencast.

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Just watch!

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In honor of Microsoft Windows Vista being released today (and all the hype that goes along with it), I wanted to show everyone a feature that really works spectacularly well - the voice recognition system. I don’t see many places talking up this feature, and I DO have to give it further testing, but so far it really works!

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Many thanks go out to Pascal van Hecke and Jon Udell for pointing out a great technique for creating a “personal podcast” using Del.icio.us, Firefox, and Greasemonkey. When I saw Pascal’s screencast, I was blown away. I decided to add some details, and try to document the process from start to finish. I then did a full-blown production within Camtasia Studio. If nothing else, I hope this screencast serves as an homage to Pascal’s work in documenting this technique.

So here is Collecting MP3s for a Personal Podcast.

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So I discovered I can do this in Second Life.

Watch Now:

 Dancing in Second Life: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Here’s the screencast (11 MB) of the install of Canvas and the Kiwi theme.

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My newest screencast to help you start videoblogging. Using two free websites, Wordpress.com and YouTube.com, you can have video up on your blog in no time.

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