Comments on: On online video quality

By: Jimmy blue

Jimmy blue — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 15:43:57 +0000

Try uploading one video to http://www.tubemogul.com, it uploads it automatically to around 20 platforms (ofcourse u need to be member on all of them) saves loads of time, and some offer high quality

By: Brad

Brad — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 17:46:03 +0000

Check out my videos at http://www.emerika.com/voe/ — I use this little known Wordpress plugin called coolplayer and it’s great. I settled on flv because it works for most everyone, but cool player will let you use .mov files.

coolplayer: http://www.coolcode.cn/?p=100

You’ll like it.

By: Paul R. Pival

Paul R. Pival — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 04:20:23 +0000

D’Arcy, just for comparison’s sake, you could also check out Viddler.com and Screencast.com, both of which provide embed code, and neither of which seem to muddy the original much at all.

By: Cris

Cris — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 04:20:00 +0000

I recently began a similar project, finding ways to easily self-host embedded videos. One alternative I’m fairly impressed with is flowplayer (http://flowplayer.org/), which is a free embeddable flash-based FLV player. I used Riva FLV encoder (http://www.rivavx.com/?encoder) to transcode a movie to FLV, then embedded the movie into a Wordpress post with flowplayer. You can see the result on my blog:

http://www.noshrinkwrap.com/2007/08/22/embedded-flash-video-test/

As for creating screencasts, I have to agree – Camtasia is the bee’s knees right now. I haven’t seen anything comparable on the Mac (Jing is up-and-coming, but will probably eventually be a pay service) – I’d be interested to see if anyone has a Mac equivalent to suggest, as I recently made the move to Mac myself. On the PC side, Wink (http://www.debugmode.com/wink/) is a decent freeware app that outputs to Flash, but not to AVI/QT/WMV/etc movie formats (which I occasionally use).

By: David Esrati

David Esrati — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 02:58:53 +0000

And of course- the real solution- don’t expect wordpress.com to do everything-
using your own server- you can embed qt just fine.
But- the blip.tv suggestion is why I read D’Arcy Norman dot net!
Thanks Brian.

By: Andy Rush

Andy Rush — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 18:29:24 +0000

Ultimately the best format for screencasts is Flash, as in SWF and not FLV. You were right when you got to “plan C” that Google Video “suck(s) the shiny out”. In general you can get way better FLV output but it requires something like Sorenson Squeeze, and FLV is not a good screen capture format anyway. Yes, flash output is why many of us pay for Camtasia. It has THE BEST screen capture CODEC, and converting to flash allows those videos to retain their quality after conversion. Their is (still) no real equivalent commercial program for the Mac. Snapz Pro (as does the less expensive iShowU) comes the closest, but no Flash (SWF) output. So having said that, there is the interesting Jing project (jingproject.com). There is a Mac version, and as of right now it’s free!

BTW, what DID you use to get your screencast? iShowU?

By: dnorman

dnorman — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 17:18:01 +0000

YouTube barfed on my source video, and would produce the same effect as Google Video – they both transcode to Flash Video. blech.

By: Heather

Heather — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 17:16:36 +0000

D’Arcy, did I miss something, why not YouTube?

By: dnorman

dnorman — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 17:13:12 +0000

hmm… still some nasty resizing issues, but I’ll try to figure that out…

By: dnorman

dnorman — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 17:11:39 +0000

well, boy howdy! blip.tv embeds just FINE on wordpress.com! excellent! thanks for the tip, Brian!