Screenrecording Thoughts
February 27th, 2010Update 1 – Project ditched.
After not having much luck using a screen recorder for the Macintosh and a free recorder for the PC, I’m evaluating one of PC commercial programs. My situation is a bit odd since I’m doing these recordings of a guest operating system running in a virtual machine. After stumbling last Summer and Fall, I managed to wrestle out a video once every couple of weeks; the commercial product, Camtasia Studio, allows me to crank them out at 4-5 times per week.
The videos consume roughly 2 MB/minute of storage space. The majority of the recordings are done on a computer desktop with a solid background color. Introducing a spreadsheet into the background, causes the data consumption to increase to 2.7 MB/min. An idle screen with just voice causes it to drop to 0.9 MB/min. This is over a duration of two and a half hours of recording. The following video format is produced:
- Format: MP4
- Dimensions: 1280×720
- Frames per second: 15
- Key frame every: 10 seconds
- Video quality: 85%
- Audio bitrate: 96 kb/s
From a self-hosted content delivery standpoint, some WordPress (blogging software) plugins use an Adobe flash player (free for non-commercial use), JW Player, to display media content from a variety of media formats. Last year I used the Shadowbox JS plugin to show videos. This year, there is a new plugin contender on the block, called Stream Video.
Alternatively, I could post my content on free delivery services such as Youtube, Vimeo and blip.tv. I know Youtube has a time limitation of approximately 10 minutes per video. The other two options are unexplored. One advantage to the self-hosting videos is that there are no oddball community rules or guidelines to follow. One drawback is there will be an unforeseen glass ceiling of realized storage and bandwidth limitations. I am aware of the actual limits (these vary per web hosting provider), but there might be a realized limit (“glass ceiling”) before the actual limit is reached. At this point, I do not know what it is or if this limit can be reached.