Scraster Professional Screencasting has had its share of different web-based video hosting over the last couple years: we’ve experimented with WordPress.com video hosting, Blip.tv, Vimeo, screencast.com, and have most recently been happy with the CDN that started it all, YouTube. At YouTube, we know we’ll have a quality compression into a universally viewable HD flash, strong indexing for search, and a dependable delivery for smooth play from their servers.

One major component that’s lacking at YouTube, however, is the personalization of a call to action at the video’s end. In fact, viewers may even be taken away from your videos to related content from the video service. And by related, we mean a Justin Beiber interview from MTV’s channel. It’s a balancing act trying to find a free or cheap video hosting solution that gives video professionals all they want and need, but Scraster thinks it may be one step closer to figuring it out.

Enter SlideShare. Ever heard of it? If you’re familiar with the business media site, chances are good that it brings to mind PowerPoint-ish slidedeck presentations that are a major bane of professional screencasters. As a strategic partner of Linkedin, SlideShare presentations are often embedded into user profiles on the social/business networking site. But then… what’s this we see? SlideShare video on a LinkedIn profile? In HD? With a nice streamlined player and a customizable lead gen form for the viewer to make direct with us? Sign us up!

On the same day Scraster found out about SlideShare’s beta video project, our most recent client, IdeaScale, had coincidentally also joined the service. On day three, during an IM chat, we shared how impressed we were. We had both already received qualified leads through the service. Scraster also got an inquiry to our website from a SlideShare user who had seen a Scraster video on SlideShare.net when it was uploaded and featured on their homepage. Cool! Finally, it’s worth noting that SlideShare behaves with standard lightbox players.

The model of SlideShare’s lead generation tool, called LeadShare, is not one we’ve seen before (which may explain why the company has a patent pending on the method of lead collection). In terms of our video player, LeadShare’s lead info collection screen appears at the end of the video in an overlayed lightbox. What makes LeadShare unique is that the users collecting the leads pays $1 per lead. If custom info, such as the viewer’s URL or other personal information from the viewer is required, the SlideShare account holder pays and additional $2 per field.

There’s always going to be the issue of insubstantial leads running us down, but “you have to spend money to make money”, and it has to be assumed that the viewer who’s watched a few minutes of a Scraster’s video is one that legitimately wants to be in touch. We’re happy to pay the premium as long as the LeadShare system is working for us. So far, so good. What do you think of our new player? Check it out on the Scraster homepage or the blog post page about our new IdeaScale video. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

Scraster has always been proud of its minimalist carbon footprint. So when we went to work to create a professional screencast for a green website called Welectricity, we were glad to know we’d have a chance to write a blog post boasting about how darn green we are. [winky emoticon here]. In all seriousness, Scraster is happy and proud to introduce Welectricity, an online social network designed to promote energy efficiency in households. The slick web service helps users monitor and decrease their electricity consumption.

After a quick set-up at Welectricity, where the user tells the site a bit about their appliances and household, Welectricity takes a few numbers from your monthly electricity bill and crunches the numbers. The service presents a graphical representation of how you’re doing and offers instructive advice of how you can be doing better. An interesting social component comes into play when you meet other Welectricity users in your area or with similar households and see how your energy use stacks up. There’s twitter-style messaging built right in to create dialogue between you and the friends you either invite to the service or those whom you meet while you’re logged on. Welectricity will save you money–and will help you and your family create a greener house and world. Sign up for free today at Welectricity.com.

Thanks to Rory Campbell for adding some nice AfterEffects elements and effects to this project. Rory’s touch is carrying Scraster to the next level these days. If you like what you see here and think that your organization’s product or service can benefit from a professional screencast, why not get a free quote? You can also email us at info@scraster.com.

Thanks for watching, commenting, and sharing!

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.

The newest professional screencast by Scraster demonstrates Fluid, a great app for Mac users who rely heavily on web-based softwares like Google Docs, Basecamp, and Pandora. Fluid.app is a software that creates apps out of online tools so that they can be launched from the Mac OSX dock, be kept in their own windows, and controled with Preferences similarly to how other regular applications can be.

Scraster Professional Screencasting produced this Fluid screencast using TechSmith’s new Camtasia for Mac screencasting software. It was Scraster’s first serious experiment with Camtasia for Mac and we’re really happy with the end result. As you may or may not know, Scraster has been ScreenFlow-based since we opened our shop. While we haven’t dumped Telestream’s ScreenFlow, we definitely have a growing *crush* on Camtasia for Mac!

We were asked to hold off on posting this vid until the proper release date of Camtasia for Mac, which is today. Now you can DL a free trial of the app at TechSmith.com, where you can also buy a specially-priced copy for $50 less than its normal $150 price tag. John Basile, Team Leader at Scraster Professional Screencasting, is in the process of writing a full review of Camtasia for Mac which will be published by scrast.net, the screencasting website, in the next day or two. The scrast.net Twitter feed has mentioned that the site will have several copies of the software to give away in the coming days, so be on the lookout.

Well, this post came to be more about Camtasia for Mac than about its original subject, which was Fluid. If you’re on a Mac, you should check out Fluid asap. Download it for free at http://fluidapp.com and then collect some great looking icons for your new Fluid apps here on Flickr. You’ll be glad you did. If you come to enjoy Fluid, please forward this video on to your friends via the “share” tool on the player or tweet this URL: http://scraster.com/fluid Thanks!

If your organization has an online product or service that could benefit from a professional screencast, get a free quote from Scraster Professional Screencasting here. You can also email us at info@scraster.com. We’re @scraster on Twitter.

Scraster Professional Screencasting is happy to add the Nambu Network to our roster of happy clients. The Nambu Network is a technology group developing some great software and services concentrating primarily in social media. Their newest service, called tr.im, is a tool for shortening URLS (for Twitter and elsewhere). With an account at tr.im, the user can log in and track their links via a rich set of analytics.

Scraster Professional Screencasting is happy to help the Nambu Network get the word out about tr.im with this overview video, which will live on the tr.im homepage. We’re also looking forward to producing a few more videos for the company’s signature app called Nambu, which is in our opinion the best Twitter client available for Mac. Nambu has changed the way Scraster uses Twitter.

If your organization has an online product or service that could benefit from a professional screencast, we invite you to get a free quote from Scraster Professional Screencasting today at scraster.com/quote. You can also email us at info@scraster.com.