Comments on: Embedding HD Quality Screencasts in Your Blog

By: Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 10:58:11 +0000

Hmm, I don’t think so, but now that I think of it, I’m not sure. I think you can just upload your Jing videos to youtube for those options. That’s what I would do instead of using screencast.com

By: Thomas

Thomas — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 09:34:10 +0000

Hi and thanks a lot for this post.
One question though… Does Screencast.com embedding display Web 2.0 buttons like ‘share this video… on Twitter, Delicious, etc?

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 13:50:40 +0000

This is a great post! I have a question. I have been able to use Jing and Screencaster to embed my video, and the quality is great…

However, Once I scale down my video to fit in my layout the video control buttons along the bottom are very small since they scale also (The play button, full screen button, etc become too small for people to easily see and be able to use)

In your example the video is scaled down but the controls are still big. How can I do this?

Thanks again for the great post!

By: phil shapiro

phil shapiro — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:42:22 +0000

I like using both YouTube and the Internet Archive for uploading my screencasts. Youtube for discoverability and the Internet Archive for free hosting of media files at any file size.

For example, here is a recent screencast of mine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7Rlh4SFYJ0

(click on HQ to see this screencast large size)

and on the Internet Archive as a 100 MB QuickTime file

http://tinyurl.com/yajkpap

By: Tom

Tom — Sat, 23 May 2009 21:20:16 +0000

Ben, for HD you need to record in 1280 x 720 pixels. Then when you embed it, try embedding at half that size, keeping the proportions. Did you search my site for other info I’ve written on HD videos? If not, do that.

By: Ben

Ben — Sat, 16 May 2009 21:40:02 +0000

I’m starting a video screencast blog to teach HTML and web coding skills. I’m using amazon’s S3 service to host my videos (in case I get a large amount of traffic some day). I’m on a mac and purchase a license for ScreenFlow… which is great! I embed the videos with the longtail flash video embedder (which allows me to easily embed their ad network in my videos for income).

The part I’m stuck on is deciding what size to record the videos in… and what is the best way to export them to a nice high quality format. I want FLV so anyone can view the videos without special plugins… but deciding the width and height in pixels and resizing/exporting to a nice resolution.

Nice article. I got a lot from it… I wish there was more information out there about recording and producing screencasts.

By: Janie

Janie — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 02:47:56 +0000

This was a really useful post with sufficient detail to make me want to sign up after checking it out. I went for the Prp version. I liked that you neither simplified nor overhyped what Jing can do.

By: Franklin Pest Control

Franklin Pest Control — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 22:45:16 +0000

nice post, i didn’t know there was a place to have HD screencasts, so this is an eyeopener for me, i can imagine all the problems with screen sizes and bandwidth, but for important videos it could be worth it.

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 03:49:21 +0000

By the way, I didn’t mention this in the post, but Youtube is also offering higher quality videos, similar (but not exactly) HD. If you click the Youtube link that I pasted above, you’ll see the high quality version (it only plays on Youtube’s site). Apparently the high quality format is experimental or beta. You can’t automatically make the videos you upload look high quality. Youtube chooses. However, if you add fmt=18 after the youtube video address, you can see the high quality.

Here’s a post with more information on Youtube and the high quality.

Even with the high quality, the screencasts are still unwatchable. I haven’t even mentioned the larger problem with HD formats — file size. If you’re on a slow bandwidth, it doesn’t stream seamlessly. I’m on 5MB down and 2MB up broadband, and the high quality version constantly stops to buffer or catch up.