We pushed some new functionality on Screencast.com which is now available to content owners. To try it out you must be in the "Beta" view.

Our new details view not only allows you to easily see and compare your content details, but it also serves as a much more convenient way to enter or update content details such as title and keywords. In addition, you can more quickly enable download links or enable commenting on the content you wish.

Here's a little video demo (2:26)

In this release we addressed an issue where people were having thumbnails in their Library go missing. You may notice that based on some feedback and testing we cleaned up some of the "tile" view interface including the big details tool tip/hover box.

As always, the best way to send us your feedback is at http://feedback.techsmith.com.

The Screencast.com team has been hard at work making improvements to make it easier for you to find, manage, and share your content. While we still have more work to do, (better folder management and playlists come to mind) you will likely notice a snappier performance and a more efficient and consistent workflow.

What do you think? The best way to send us feedback is to post it here. Thanks in advance for taking the time to tell us your thoughts. We crave it.

Have three minutes? Check out this overview video.

Learn about everything that's new and changed!

After reading thousands of feedback emails you've sent us--and responding to as many as we could (probably hundreds)--we're trying something new.

We're using a platform called Get Satisfaction and would love to hear what you think. Get Satisfaction is carefully crafted around the idea that when companies and customers work more closely together--out in the open--everyone wins. We're looking forward to the increased transparency and the ability help people find answers to questions we frequently get via the former feedback forms.

Feel free to head on over to Get Satisfaction right now and post a topic or a response. We're just getting started, so you have a chance to help make it great by sharing your questions, answers, and ideas.

Here's what's in it for you...

• Have a louder voice: Other people can vote up your requests (or you can say "me too" to theirs!) and our product teams will better understand what people need and why
• Find answers faster: Get Satisfaction increases the odds that you'll find the best answer--before you even post a question!
• Hear from a broad range of experts: Over time, you'll see responses not just from our amazingly dedicated and knowledgeable volunteer moderators...but you'll see technical responses from TechSmith developers, tips and work-arounds from user-assistance specialists, and responses from the Product Managers who shape the future direction of the products.

We have high hopes that Get Satisfaction will enhance your TechSmith experience and help you rock (even more!) at what you do. Please give it a try and let us know what you think!

Sharing usernames and passwords is a universal problem for content creators such as educators and trainers who want targeted delivery of their material. As educational institutions move toward more online instruction and testing/certification, ensuring the identity of the student doing the work is a problem that the entire industry is interested in solving. Many solutions exist to test the identity of students prior to taking exams or submitting coursework online. These solutions range from not doing online testing (proctoring), to simple challenge questions to which the test participant would easily know the answers but others would not, to even biometric identification for gaining access to systems. Regardless, I can imagine that even in the most secure situations, students will find a way to cheat any given system. It's an old-ish Web page but I found this link to be relevant to the discussion of authenticating students in online and distance-learning systems: http://www.nmc.org/nmctab/authenticating-students

I would be interested to hear from others how they've addressed or dealt with the problem of online student identity verification. Here's an example of how Blackboard has integrated a challenge-question solution to confirm student identity: http://blackboard.com/Teaching-Learning/Extend-Learn/Featured-Partners/Blackboard-and-Acxiom.aspx Do you use an online LMS to provide student access to coursework? Do you integrate your Screencast.com hosted content in those LMS systems...or did you know you can? Lots of questions and possible solutions to explore.

Screencast.com respects the privacy of viewers as much as it respects the privacy of the content that our customers create. In that regard, we don't capture any personal information that would be used to identify viewers of content, so relating actual views of media to specific viewers is something that we don't do by design. We also explicitly state that we won't share what information we do collect with third-parties. However, we are experimenting with ways to generate more statistics on the generic habits of viewers, and we have ways to integrate your Google Analytics ID into the view page on Screencast.com for general viewing of page hit stats, and even into the Flash player that we host on the view page, or the Flash player you embed on your own site, to generate specific stats on a per-media basis. If you have a Google Analytics ID and want to be part of a pilot program to generate metrics and feedback for our development team, contact me at d.frazier@techsmith.com.

As a content delivery service, we understand the need to maintain the security of content that our corporate customers target for delivery in some circumstances. We also understand that educators want to keep students focused on the coursework that's most relevant to them - and even keep students from accessing work that other students might have submitted or that an instructor is storing in their Screencast.com account. We will continue to re-evaluate our security measures and explore methods that enhance the overall Security of Screencast.com.

-Dirk

Hi there - Dirk here with what will hopefully be a quick post about everyone's favorite topic - Time. We never have enough time to get what we want done. There's only 24 hours in a day. The typical work day is eight hours, though some work more and some less. When you create an instructional or tutorial video, you want to get your point across in as little time as possible because it's hard to hold someone's attention for more than a few minutes - especially with online video. The temptation to pop open another window and continue browsing is just too great. I think I have 16 Chrome tabs open at the moment with videos in some of them that I started to watch but switched away from...but as usual, I digress.

Videos take time to make, and they take time to play back. How long your video can be often depends on where you want to host it. One video hosting site used to limit your video to 10 minutes, now they limit you to 15. Some content creation tools let you create video that's no longer than five minutes (Hmmm wonder who that is?), while other video creation tools let you make as long a video as you'd like (and they give you the editing tools to make it bearable to watch).

Screencast.com does not impart a prescribed time limit to the video you upload, mostly because we want you to have control over your own destiny. Seriously. If you want to create an hour long video on the benefits of green tea versus yoga, then be our guest. We'll wait, but your viewers might not.

This week I'm cheating. I'm dipping into the Jing feedback folder to respond to a few similar questions, and draw attention to the fact that Jing and Screencast.com are connected for a reason.

In fact, I could use this opportunity to point out that everyone who uses Jing should ALWAYS use Screencast.com as their hosting/sharing solution...but I'm biased of course. (for those who don't know, I'm the product manager for both Jing and Screencast.com :)) Even I know that users of Jing and other content creation tools have reasons for using those tools in their own way. I recently conducted several user interviews where I got to watch how people use Jing in their daily lives and the results pleasantly surprised me. I saw a lot of content being captured with Jing and then sent to Snagit and Camtasia Studio for further editing before being published to Screencast.com and other destinations. That's the kind of workflow that not everyone understands, but when you do, it opens your eyes to the unlimited possibilities that now exist.

Anyway, I digress. Here are two comments from Jing users that I hope this post can address:

By the way, I used Jing to take these snapshots and I sent the images to Snagit to make the neat curled edge effect. From Snagit's editor, I then sent the images to my Screencast.com account which immediately returned to me the HTML embed code that I pasted into this article. Simple, eh (that's for you Sharon)?

Ok, now on to the response: FOLDERS! Everyone needs to organize their content, and Screencast.com gives you a great way to do that with the Screencast.com object we call Folders. We thought folders were so cool, we even let you create them in our other content creation tools like Jing, Snagit, Camtasia Studio, and Camtasia Relay. "But where ARE they?" you might ask...

Folders are accessible in Jing through the Button Settings dialog in the Preferences section of Jing's More ball:

The idea is that, from within our tools, you can create a unique button for each folder to which you want to send content. Click on the button you want to customize, or click New to create a new button:

From here you can pick from any of the folders that are in your Screencast.com account, or you can choose to edit folders directly. This would allow you to create a new folder in your Screencast.com account, that you would then select back in the Jing interface.

Jing is smart, so if you have a folder that is private (requiring a password or user authentication to access it), you won't be able to have the button retrieve embed code. Embedding content is only allowed from Public or Hidden folders (Your Jing folder is a hidden folder on Screencast.com). You can have up to eight (8) buttons appear in your Jing preview window:

Now that I've demonstrated one way to use TechSmith's online hosting and sharing solution to do your organizing - what if you wanted to create a unique button to save your content into different local file system destinations (or FTP directories, or Facebook accounts, or...)? You can create new buttons that have unique file paths to your hard drive, FTP site, or Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/Flickr accounts.

We're always interested in hearing what you have to say, so at this point I guess I should quit yammering on and let you, the readers, tell us what you like or don't like about this particular point of integration. So let us have it! And of course, Happy Screencasting (and Jinging!).
- Dirk

Have you ever had problems finding answers to your questions regarding Screencast.com? Do you struggle with finding or getting technical support at TechSmith?

"Cindy" writes in with the following comments and question:

It just so happens that you can find a link to our Technical Support site on the very same feedback page that is used to submit comments and questions:

Regarding the download link - as a content owner, when you log into your account and view content, you will always see the download link in the Details tab. When you log out and view the same piece of content, the download link won't appear unless you explicitly enable the download link option in the Edit Details dialog.

Of course, this information is also available in the Screencast.com Help Center by searching on the text 'Download link' and you'll find a written tutorial on the subject of the download link - and there's even a great video tutorial on the subject that explains that as a content owner, you'll always see the content's download link when you're logged into your account.

I hope this example helps folks find our support services and help center content...there's a lot of good information in these services. It would be a shame for it to all go unnoticed.

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.

Hi - I am Barb Hernandez, the User Experience Manager at TechSmith. I manage a team of designers and researcher who work with the product teams here at TechSmith.

Recently I had the opportunity to spend an evening with a group of graduate students at University of Michigan's School of Information (SI). These students are studying, among other things, Human Computer Interaction. Each month they get together for a Design Jam where they work on a design problem for a local company or organization. At our jam session, students looked at the concepts we have for sharing content on Screencast.com: Media Roll, Playlists and Folders, but focused on the idea of the "Playlist" as a mechanism for sharing content when that content is organized in more than one folder on Screencast.com. They also tackled the differences between sharing and viewing shared content.

During the session the group reviewed the design problem in detail then broke into smaller groups to brainstorm and mock up potential solutions. Each team had great ideas to improve the workflow, simplify the concepts and generally make it easier to create, share and view content.

Some pictures of the design ideas from each of the 5 groups can be found here: http://www.screencast.com/t/NspigGSSXC.

Please feel free to add your thoughts or feedback on these ideas or even add your own solution. More details about each solution is in the comments section for each group's design ideas.

As some of you know we recently added the ability to let viewers comment on content that's hosted on Screencast.com. If you are not familiar with the feature, here's a screencast that will walk you through the details:

http://www.screencast.com/t/ZGNhvOvnv

During earlier design discussions we took the conservative approach and decided to release the feature in an "off by default" state, meaning that for every piece of content on which an owner wanted to collect comments, the content owner would have to manually enable the feature after upload. We did not want to upset content owners who, for whatever reason, did not want viewers to comment on their content. And with an email notification message as part of the option, we did not want to begin filling up unsuspecting content owners' email in-boxes with unexpected comment notifications.

So with that said, and lacking any quantitative data to support our earlier decision, I've decided to solicit some input from all of you. Submit a comment to this post with your vote yea or nay to having the Commenting feature turned ON by default (changing the way it works today). We're here and listening so of course if you have any other suggestions, feel free to submit those as well. And as always - Happy Screencasting!

- Dirk