The Screencast.com team has been hard at work since last month's public launch. I told you all then that I was excited about the future of Screencast.com and I hope that our release scheduled for next Tuesday demonstrates what I'm talking about. Here's a peek at what will be on the menu:

MPEG-4 and H.264 support

Our Flash player will now support playing MPEG-4 content encoded with H.264, as well as FLV (with or without H.264), and SWF output created with Camtasia Studio or Jing. With the Quicktime and Windows Media Player browser plug-ins installed we still support .MOV (with and without H.264 encoding), and .WMV formats, so we're off to a good start with regard to supporting internet-based video content. We're still talking internally about Silverlight support so let me know your thoughts along those lines.

Media RSS (MRSS) support and auto-discovery

This is particularly exciting. I often use a public folder on Screencast.com to host a slew of vacation or event photos and then share the link to that folder. However, Screencast.com doesn't yet have a fancy view page with navigation controls, and so the better way to share the entire folder is with a Playlist, or embed a MediaRoll on my website or in a blog post. But even those options are somewhat limited by the design of the Playlist or my ability to update my Website quickly and easily. PicLens (http://www.piclens.com/) is an immersive, full screen environment that displays content (images and Flash video) as a dynamic wall of thumbnails. The wall can be manipulated with the click of a mouse to scroll and zoom, and you can switch to a "playlist-like" view of the folder contents with a single click. It has to be seen to be appreciated, but in my opinion, it's one of the neatest media display tools around, and mashing it up with your Screencast.com content is as easy as opening a public folder and clicking the PicLens icon in your browser's toolbar. If your viewer has PicLens installed in their Web browser, sharing a link to a folder of content just became the best view in the house.

There will be more coming on Tuesday so be patient and in the meantime, tell me what you think you need with regard to creating conversations around your media - we're working on threaded text comments and we're about to do our first iteration post-prototype. If you're interested in taking a look, drop me a comment or an email and we'll get in touch with you.

Dirk Frazier
Product Manager - Screencast.com
TechSmith Corporation