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!

The Screencast.com team is excited to announce the availability of a number of new features, including Google Analytics integration, Closed Caption editing, mobile display of hotspots with HTML5, and social networking integrations with Twitter, Facebook, and Get Satisfaction.

Many customers have requested increased access to data associated with viewing their content. While we provide basic information, both free and Pro users can now tap into the power of Google Analytics. Content owners can also now receive event data from the Flash player, which provides added insight into how content is consumed. Click My Account then enter your key as shown here:

All three TechSmith Camtasia products have recently beefed up captioning abilities. Some of the many uses for closed captions include providing a richer viewing experience for people who are hard of hearing, watching video on an iPad on a crowded bus, or who use English as a second language. But what if you don't use a Camtasia product or want to change captions after the video is already on Screencast.com? Well, we've created a Silverlight-based caption editor right on Screencast.com. Check out the tutorial!

Flash hotspots are now supported by our HTML5 player. Who cares about this feature the most? Well, this one's for Camtasia Studio users who wanted hotspots to work in non-Flash conditions--like on an iPad. Screencast.com now also supports WebM video for those who want to share video created with this format. We now have feature parity among our Flash, Silverlight, and HTML5 viewing environments.

Finally, we've integrated Screencast.com with Facebook, Twitter, and Get Satisfaction. Viewers of public content will be able to "Tweet" or "Like" the content that they're viewing. And you can now join our growing community of users on Get Satisfaction that are interacting with dozens of TechSmithies from all areas of the company. Get Satisfaction is a much better way for us to hear what you're asking for and help answer questions you might have. From your Library or Folder view, you can use the Feedback tab on the right hand side of the screen, or just visit http://feedback.techsmith.com.

TechSmith product teams are hard at work to make 2011 our best year yet. We've got our eyes on improving our end-to-end user experience, from content creation to consumption. We trust you will be pleasantly surprised by what emerges from TechSmith this spring...and we don't mean the croci. And finally, please tell us what you think of the new features. What can we do for you?

Fall in mid-Michigan usually means cooler temps, lots of great color, and school buses. While the temperature continues to be unseasonably high, and the color really hasn't taken off like most would prefer, school is definitely back in session, and Screencast.com is here to lend a hand. After all, we are part of the TechSmith family - and TechSmith is helping to drive the revolution that's happening in the education world today.

Our products are the tools that students and teachers use to create engaging content that motivates kids to learn. Jing, Camtasia Studio, Camtasia for Mac, and Camtasia Relay are regularly used to quickly communicate great ideas and record lectures and classroom activities, and to deliver all that great content to the masses is Screencast.com. It's like we have a plan or something. :)

I've written previously about how Screencast.com can be used in the classroom to help organize and deliver digital media. With our latest update last week, we're also now supporting the display of closed captions created in Camtasia Studio 7.1, Camtasia for Mac 1.2, and CamtasiaRelay 3.0, on three platforms - Flash, Silverlight (with Camtasia Relay content only for now), AND HTML5! Imagine the possibilities when viewers have access to content hosted on Screencast.com from their iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. Classrooms are never going to be the same.

Even more exciting is the ability to search through the caption and transcription text of a video - effectively letting the viewer navigate to points of interest as easily as typing in a keyword or two. Today Screencast.com supports search on the Flash and Silverlight platforms, and an HTML5 solution should be here soon. We're also supporting Tables of contents in Flash, Silverlight, and HTML5, and Flash-based hot spots created with the Camtasia family of products...and we're not done yet!

Fall may be seen by some as the end of many things - but to us, it's the start of great things coming out of TechSmith and Screencast.com.

-Dirk

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.

So many things are started with such good intentions, and then for whatever reason(s) are left languishing in various states of disuse and mismanagement. My gardens and flowerbeds at home were one such example. I couldn't keep up with the work because, well for one thing, I can't tell the difference between Ambrosia artemisiifolia and Cosmos bipinnatus. So I let it all grow wild, and made the excuse that if it flowered, it was pretty to look at. The top of the hill in my back yard still has that theme going (because I still think that if it has flowers it's pretty and the deer need a place to sleep too), but with the help of a good friend I finally started to dive into the beds around the house in earnest this year and I'm happy to say that the results are something to be proud of again.

Blogs are kind of like flowerbeds and gardens. They both need a lot of attention and require constant maintenance in order to be successful. The Screencast.com blog has not had attention paid to it, nor has it been maintained, and for that I take full responsibility. But to carry the flower/garden analogy forward at the risk of becoming trite, the team and I here at TechSmith will be doing a full-scale landscaping job on the Screencast.com blog property this summer. Who doesn't like to roll up your sleeves, break out the shovel and rake, and of course pull a few weeds? I've learned to use mulch strategically, chemicals sparingly (except on ants), and I'll take the same approach with the blog.

Some of you might know Mike Curtis...he's the TechSmithian force behind the Jing blog. He and our Customer Engagement team as well as our development and other technical team members will help out, just so you won't have to listen to my ramblings all the time. Each week I'll pick an (anonymous) entry from our collection of Customer Feedback and publish my response. Hopefully these posts will provide more insight into the direction of Screencast.com. Mike and the others will augment those discussions with references to tutorial videos and help content and maybe even a contest or two along the way. You will even start to see developers from other product teams contributing with more technical discussions on the future of screencasting and online video. Ultimately my vision is to have the Screencast.com blog be a blog to which you subscribe because you don't want to miss a word we write.

Screencast.com is still alive and growing - even if our blog didn't demonstrate that very well. And we're still working hard to bring you the best place to host your original quality screen recordings and captures. We've just been busy these past few months weeding the code and killing some bugs...

-Dirk

W00t! Silverlight is coming to Screencast.com and boy are we glad. I probably don't have to tell you all that the Windows Media Player browser plug-in is bad. Stinky bad, and undevelopable, and ugly, and bad. Want to display a Table of Contents in the WMP plug-in? Tough. Want closed captions to display? Too bad. How about a nifty little feature that would let you jump ahead to a section of your video that has yet to be downloaded? No way.

Oh sure, you can do all this with Flash, and maybe someday with HTML5 (yep, we know about HTML5)...but for now, if you NEED to encode your content into the WMV format, you can only get these whiz-bang features with an enhanced Silverlight player. The just-released Camtasia Relay 2.0 is going to be the first to relish in these powerful new features, like the ability to search though speech transcripts and text scraped from PowerPoint slides. Going forward, we will be working hard to provide more even more features in our enhanced Silverlight player.

So let us be the first to welcome you to Screencast.com's 21st Century, and let's all bow our heads and have a moment of silence while we commemorate the end of the Windows Media Player browser plug-in.

Screencast.com is continuing to grow and improve. We started our most recent development sprint back in November 2009, before there was snow on the ground. The Holiday season came and went, I gained a few pounds; and the Screencast.com team has continued to work on a variety of visible and not-so-visible enhancements which we just unveiled today with our most recent publish. 2010 will be all about iteration and improvement (and hopefully weight-loss), but with an ear to the ground and an eye to the future. We'll need your help to let us know what works and what doesn't work.

So what DO we have to show you? Well, you can now customize the colors of your embeddable Flash player (by virtue of embed code flashvars for now).

You can now "deep link" into MP4 video through the use of a time-coded URL, and we'll automatically hyperlink any reference to video time in comments.

We cleaned up the iTunes and podcast publishing process, and we put some things in place to better handle viewing mobile compatible content through mobile devices - though you will still need to know what kind of content is compatible with what devices...more on that later.

We did a lot of things we can't show you but you'll appreciate none-the-less. Those things have more to do with backend, architectural improvements to support the millions of viewers that visit the site and the even more millions of pieces of content that are constantly being uploaded, managed, and shared. We also did a few things we can't show you yet, but will one day. Think Silverlight, multiple account management, intra-video text searching, and ... dare I say subfolders? Someday...

Well, what's clear is that we're not running out of things to do, thanks to you. So thank you to all of you who've been so loyal to Screencast.com; all of TechSmith appreciates your business. I and the team will continue to read your feedback each and every day, and I will do my best to respond personally when I can. Happy New Year to everyone and as always - happy screencasting!

-Dirk