Video Hosting / Creation Decision

To say I’m disappointed with some of the software I’m encountering is an understatement. Jing had been advertised as an excellent way to record and share video tutorials. However, the free version of Jing only lets you output to an .swf video – a format that is universally unaccepted at the various video sites. Screencast – the video host that Jing makes you join to share your videos – is fine, but the free version only allows 2MB of transfer bandwidth per month. Depending on how many students you have taking your class, this could be a problem.

I tried to convert the .swf to .avi, but there isn’t free software out there that does this respectably. At least, none that I’ve found. This pretty much eliminated Jing (and Screencast) from my class-building adventure. I do still give Jing high marks for screen capture – my screen captures using Jing are clear, beautiful, and easy to annotate.

So, I went back to CamStudio and recorded in the highest possible settings. Since I didn’t see any point in doing another “test” video, I recorded my introduction to the Alabama Virtual Library.

Here is the video on Google Videos:

[Actually, Google won't let me upload a video this size. So, they're out.]

Here is the same video from Blip.tv:



And, finally, the same video from Daily Motion:

AVL
Uploaded by kagriffiths

I have made several design decisions based on this:

1. I will use blip.tv for my video hosting.
2. I will use Jing for my screen captures.
3. I will use CamStudio for my video captures.