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.

As the popularity of screencasting increases, so do the number of software options for screencast producers. The cheap, free, and web-based software options are too numerous to list; there seems to be a newcomer each week, varying only slightly from the last. Considering commercial products for creating truly professional screencast videos drastically narrows one’s options and the options are fewer still if one is using a Mac. As far as Scraster Professional Screencasting is concerned, the options for proffesional screencast production can be counted on one finger: ScreenFlow (originally created by Vara Software and recently acquired by Telestream) is the hands-down leader in Mac-based screencasting software.

TechSmith’s Camtasia is the unrivaled leader on the PC side of professional screencasting and they’ve recently updated their blog with screenshots of the long-anticipated Camtasia for the Mac, which they say will drop later in 2009. Ambrosia Software, makers of SnapzPro X, also say that they have an update on the way. Between Camtasia for the Mac, SnapzPro X, and ScreenFlow (and let’s not rule out the wildcard) all rivaling for Mac market share, it will be interesting to see how things go in 2009.

For now, ScreenFlow is running the show for Mac-based professional screencasters. Despite it’s numerous  bugs, stability issues, lack of support, and lack of community, it’s the only game in town for doing what it does.  First, ScreenFlow is capable of capturing everything, including DVD video and the screens of VMFusion. Second, ScreenFlow, by default, captures everything on your screen with every capture. There’s no need to pick and highlight an area – that’s all done in post-production…which, in ScreenFlow, is hardly another stage. Once video is captured with ScreenFlow, there’s no rendering time involved before one is able to edit – you can get right to it.

There are some significant shortcomings in the editing area of ScreenFlow, but the extensive feature list compensates. The timeline interface is as clean and intuitive as iMovie (and very similar, in fact), and adding zooms and pans, highlights and video effects is a snap. Mouse movements can be tracked with a variety of callout effects, and keystrokes can also be shown on screen. The ability to import PNGs opens up your options to the extent of your imagination. For example, using transparent PNGs is how one can incorporate titling and overlayed imagery into their productions. Tragically, ScreenFlow doesn’t have any proper titling functionality, but most likely will in its next update.

Video compression and export quality is another of ScreenFlow’s strong suits. ScreenFlow uses custom GPU algorithms to give your finished movie the best possible quality. The user can export in a slew of different presets, and the options for customization are many. Exporting at 1280x720px creates a true HD video that can be uploaded to the number of online sites (like Blip.tv) that are now offering HD. You can view the Scraster promo video on our homepage for an idea of how sharp full-screen HD can look.

For now, Scraster Professional Screencasting and a lot of other professional screencasters are depending on ScreenFlow exclusively. But in the field of professional screencasting software, things change fast. Which screencasting software will be making our lives easiest by the end of the year remains to be seen.

UPDATE: Blip.tv is not meant for commercial use and removed Scraster’s videos.