My customer feedback item of the week comes to us from "Dustin". He writes:

First I should mention that I read EVERY piece of feedback that is submitted to us, and while I would love to respond in person to each item, I'm afraid that would be all I do all day every day...so this blog will be where I can pick one comment or question and present it for all to read and learn. Also, I should explain that I'm going to use the names of my friends and family in place of real names mostly because they'll find it funny. This week my brother Dustin is climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. D00d, please be careful.

Ok, to the point. Flash is not a codec (and technically Quicktime is not a format) but I think I understand your dilemma. Flash is a platform and Apple has indeed chosen not to support Flash on its mobile devices. The Screencast.com team now gets to deal with not just two different environments for viewing online video (Flash and Silverlight), but now three, with the addition of HTML5. The Screencast.com team published an update to the service on June 22 which in fact uses the video tag in HTML5 to display properly formatted video content in the Safari browser on Apple iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touches. It isn't fancy, and it doesn't yet offer options like Table of Contents and closed captioning, but one day it will.

Notice I said "properly formatted." Apple devices and browsers only support playback of video created with specific codecs, specific frame sizes, bit rates, and audio formats. So unless you use TechSmith tools like Camtasia Studio, Camtasia for the Mac, or Camtasia Relay to create your content (or you know exactly what you're doing with other tools), the content you create and upload to Screencast.com may or may not play on an Apple mobile device. This is because Screencast.com does not re-encode your content. That differentiating fact is overlooked by the majority of people who wonder why the content they produce and upload to us won't play properly. The simple fact that we don't re-encode content will become an even bigger problem/opportunity now that we've moved to support HTML5, because not all browsers support all video codecs.

It was challenging enough when we only had to worry about which version of Flash the viewer had installed...now we get to consider the mind-numbing combinations of video codecs and Web-browsers. If you produce your content using a TechSmith tool that encoded it with H.264, then that video won't play in the HTML5 Video tag inside Firefox because Firefox is taking the open source high ground and only playing nice with Theora encoded video. It would be nice if the W3C came out sooner than later with a simple standard that everyone agreed on, but that wouldn't be fun, now would it? Unfortunately the vast majority of TechSmith encoded video is produced using the H.264 codec. Should TechSmith jump on the Theora bandwagon since it's at least theoretically possible to view Theora encoded content in Internet Explorer 6-8 and Safari with a few add-ons and extensions ? Theora is supported natively in Firefox, Chrome, and Opera but what's its quality like compared to H.264? Not everyone is happy with the quality of the content encoded with Theora, but it continues to improve as the codec is developed. Hmmm...maybe VP8 is the way to go. You get the picture now?

The problem is that we are smack-dab in the middle of a good old fashioned codec war. MPEG-LA holds the rights to H.264, and Apple and Microsoft are heavily invested in that organization. IE 9 will support H.264 because (ok I'm editorializing just a bit here) Microsoft has that vested interest in MEPG-LA. MPEG-LA is fighting back by stating that even Theora may not be immune from patent violation lawsuits. And then Google goes and buys On2 and opens up VP8 as the next, great free video codec. The debate is quite heated, as you can imagine, and the discussions are ongoing here at TechSmith about what to do in the future. And of course supporting another video format and/or codec won't make matters easier for the Screencast.com team, but then we're not afraid of a little hard work.

Some would argue that to solve the problem, Screencast.com should re-encode your content so that it can play on any device that one might use to view it. That's a fair argument, provided you are willing to pay for the service of having it re-encoded and the storage of the multiple versions required to meet the different combinations. So-called free hosting services pay their bandwidth and storage bills by selling ads. TechSmith does not. And in case you missed it in the links and commentaries above, there are also a lot of legal issues involved in re-encoding content. Suffice it to say that we are in fact looking at those kinds of options for the future of Screencast.com. It's not cheap, and we're not Google...need I say more?

In the end, it's all about quality of playback and the economies of scale. H.264 provides the best playback quality and works with the VAST majority of viewers who are in Flash and Silverlight environments. H.264 does OK with HTML5, and future improvements to the HTML5 "standard" might make the viewing experience on par with Flash or Silverlight, but I'm not holding my breath until then. Flash is not dead, and there are an increasing number of iPads out there. It's too bad the two are, for the time being, mutually exclusive.