Until this week, Scraster Professional Screencasting had been using the online service Vimeo for the hosting of our website and blog video. We considered Vimeo to be the best of the various video hosts around for a number of reasons—the player was nice looking, branding was minimal, call-to-action links could be embedded at the video’s end, and the sharing features would enable the viewer to email, post, or embed the video elsewhere. Our Vimeo Plus account gave us great new HD capabilities that made our HD videos shine, and last but not least, Vimeo’s indexing provided Scraster some pretty strong Google juice.

Understanding that Vimeo’s service is meant strictly for non-commercial use, it was admittedly unprofessional for Scraster to be using (or abusing) Vimeo. It was just so enticing because the product was so perfect. Plans had actually been in place for some time to migrate our content to another service. We just… hadn’t gotten around to it.

The priority of of our migration from Vimeo to another video hosting service came to the fore last week when a high-profile Scraster client disrespectfully embedded a Scraster video in their homepage code. This public sharing of an overtly commercial video hosted by Scraster’s own Vimeo account was pretty quickly followed by the dreaded email saying our content would be removed in 48 hours. Vimeo’s email suggested we quickly find an alternative. I’ve seen and read others online complain about the injustice of the removal of their content, but Scraster understood the risks and we’re happy to move on. We’ll miss Vimeo, but web is constantly in flux, right?

Since January, Scraster has had its eye on screencast.com, the file-hosting end of screencasting giants TechSmith. Screencast.com has become a lot more visible through the huge success of Jing, the free screencapture and screencasting tool for Mac and PC. For Jing users at the basic level, screencast.com is a free storehouse of content captured from the desktop. Screencast.com is actually much bigger than Jing, though, and has developed into a viable CMS for video and other content. With its slick integration with the Camtasia Studio and new Camtasia for Mac screencasting softwares, users can upload their videos straight from the software to the web. And we’re not talking about YouTube-looking video. Let’s get into player details.

Screencast.com plays video as it’s uploaded—no compression or transcoding. This could be a benefit and a drawback. The benefit is stuff looks great in its original form and what you upload is what you get–no lame surprises after twenty minutes of uploading. The drawback is that Mac users have to convert to a Flash format so as not to alienate those users without QuickTime installed. (Exciting note here: Flash 10 can read QT files. When users are up to speed with Flash 10, QT will be fair play for all).

We thought the actual video player from screencast.com was aesthetically perfect for Scraster.com. It wasn’t free, but there was a much larger roadblock–the screencast.com player embed code wasn’t working with Videobox, the unfortunately-named video lightbox script Scraster utilizes at our website and blog to get our vids to jump off the page to be viewed at dimensions much larger than the page could afford. The Videobox script (which is available as a WordPress plugin here) is based on Lightbox v2 and uses swfobject to embed flash. We presume that this was the hang-up for the screencast.com player to work in the plugin.

Fortunately, the development team at screencast.com volunteered to provide Scraster with custom code to get our video lightbox to work. Perfect. We are happy to share the code with you, which gets placed into the “videobox.js” file (which lives within the folder called “js” in the Videobox code) :

else if (sLinkHref.match(/content\.screencast\.com/i)) {
    this.flash = true;
    var hRef = sLinkHref;
    this.so = new SWFObject("http://content.screencast.com/flvplayer.swf","flvvideo",
    this.options.contentsWidth, this.options.contentsHeight, "0", "#000");
    this.so.addVariable("content", hRef);
    this.so.addParam("allowFullScreen", "true" );
    this.so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");}
  

With the .js code updated, you’d only have to change the video URL in the code where you want to put the lightbox on your webpage. This URL is not the video’s browser URL. You’ll have to get the link from the screencast.com embed code from the content server. It should look something like this (janky as hell) link:
http://content.screencast.com/users/scraster/folders/scraster.com/media/30fdc023-3034-4d7b-a5b5-32fd18c4cb32/valgen-intro-720.flv

A few notes about the screencast.com player in your lightbox: The allowFullScreen parameter is optional. If it’s set to “true”, then it will allow clicking the full screen button in the player. To set the player to autoplay when the lightbox opens, you can add this param to the .js code above:

this.so.addParam("autostart", "true" );

The screencast.com team doesn’t officially support this Videobox hack, so please try not to bother them with questions about it! Contact Scraster if you don’t understand how this all works and we’ll do our best to help you.

The screencast.com player is great for what it is: a fairly priced platform for easily video content manage with a nice looking delivery system for Scraster’s videos, but there are a couple ways in which we think the service should be improved. One major downfall of screencast.com is that they do not index the contents of the site with search engines. As it’s been thoughtfully described to us by Dirk Frazier, screencast.com’s product manager, this is a complicated situation. Basically, it wouldn’t be fair to the service’s free users–who come to be charged when their bandwith and storage exceeds a certain threshold—if their content was easily searchable. Likewise there are privacy issues. On the other hand, premium account owners like Scraster– who want their content shared as much as possible—don’t get any Google love. And there are no personalized links. To further minimize sharing, there are no “share” options when a video concludes similar to how there are on other web video hosting players like YouTube or Vimeo.

Taking the good with the bad, Scraster is very happy with our new hosting at screencast.com and we now have the peace of mind that our content is not in violation of terms, which is a major relief. We’re once again trading absolute control of our videos (gained only by self-hosting) for the convenience of a nice CMS, but we’re comfortable with that for now. What are your thoughts about screencast.com’s hosting? How’s our new player look? Aside from self-hosting and using a Flash player like JW Player, what are some other options you’d recommend? Thanks for sharing your ideas.

Afterthought: Vimeo also helped Scraster with coding our Videobox lightbox plugin back in February. If you’re using Vimeo (for non-commercial content) and would like to learn how to get Vimeo to work with the a lightbox video player like Videobox, you can read that Vimeo support thread here.