Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, June 29, 2007:
Flash Video Player That Doesn’t Compress Video to Dust?
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I’ve tried using YouTube and the ilk for video, but it just doesn’t work for my use. The videos I often present are not me jumping around in a monkey suite, where the resolution is not important. I want a flash video player that leaves the video uncompressed or at least leaves it at a good enough resolution that text can be read. Anyone know of such a product? It would be great if I could host it myself, but I’m open to a hosted solution as well.
Discussion
37signals and CodeIgniter's demos are two spots I can think of where they've done screencapture videos that are completely legible. Whatever Apple's doing with QT on the iPhone tours is phenomenal.
Created by Mark on 06.29.2007 11:06 am
I think they link directly to the mov and/or embed the mov. That's what I do now, but it'd be nice to have a flash version so it could be cross platform. The QT install base is bigger now thanks to iTunes so I guess that would work well enough.
Created by Ian on 06.29.2007 11:53 am
Ian, you might want to check out Viddler:
http://www.viddler.com/
I believe it's still flash based but might offer some features YouTube doesn't. It's a startup by Colin Devroe and Chris Tingom from 9rules.
Created by Mike Rohde on 06.29.2007 12:44 pm
Maybe this is worth checking out. Never really played with it, but maybe...
http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=Flash_Video_Player
Created by Jochem on 06.29.2007 2:42 pm
I've been very happy with the JW FLV player mentioned above — there are plug-ins available for many CMS / Blogging software, being self-hosted lets me decided how much compression is appropriate, and Flash has much better multi-platform support than QuickTime.
You'll also need something that can create Flash Video files but there are plenty of free tools out there based on ffmpeg that can convert just about anything.
Created by Bryce on 06.29.2007 4:50 pm
Camtasia produces losslessly compressed Flash files (SWF, not FLV)
Created by Kevin Dangoor on 06.29.2007 11:52 pm
The video encoder that comes with Flash has a lot of options for compression and bandwidth targets, if you use that directly you should be able to get quality you're happy with.
Created by Gavin Bowman on 07.01.2007 6:05 am
I'm just curious why you just don't use flash. You can change the compression settings and actually have it "stream" off the file. With flash 8, you can even import the files directly into flash and it has some preset skins you can use.
Created by Brandon on 07.02.2007 3:09 pm
That's an interesting idea. I guess I would prefer to just put a file someplace (website or on my server) and have it "just work" rather than going into flash and creating my own files, etc. It's an option though.
Created by Ian on 07.02.2007 3:11 pm
Hi Ian, I pinged you a little while ago about our ShowMeDo.com. We offer private hosting (in addition to the public, free tutorial screencasts) with crytal-clear playback using the JW FLV player.
We provide the bandwidth and magic, you embed 10 lines of html and 'it just works'. If you want to unload worries about capacity and simultaneous deliveries, we have that well-covered.
We have a growing set of customers here in the UK and I received a Wow reaction from a panel of 30 when presenting the idea just a few days back 
We'd be happy to help (ian AT showmedo.com),
Ian.
Created by Ian Ozsvald on 07.05.2007 8:29 am
Thanks Ian. I thought you guys only did tutorials, not just any random video. Can it be embedded in my pages or I have to link over to your site?
Created by Ian on 07.05.2007 2:20 pm
For ShowMeDo itself we only host tutorial material - the videos have to be of interest to our community.
If you wanted non-tutorial streaming videos (at the same quality as ShowMeDo videos) then that's a service we provide separately.
Several of our clients have marketing and training videos - they just embed 10 lines of html and 'it just works'. We're getting a *lot* of interest for this for showing how-programs-work, how-to-use-the-website and frequently-needed-walkthrough videos.
For an example see Kwiqq.com's 2wentysworld.co.uk site and click 'Getting Started' or 'Building Your Website' - these two tutorial videos stream from our servers. Look at the html for the code, it is very straightforward.
Hope that helps?
Ian.
Created by Ian Ozsvald on 07.06.2007 8:40 am
Not sure of your need exactly, but you may want to check out CamStudio, which is free and something I ran across recently, but haven't had a need to try yet. It's function seems to be video-screen-capture converted to Flash.
Another Flash screen capture/tutorial utility is Wink. I have tried this, it's very useful but I haven't tried the most recent version, which looks even better from a feature perspective.
I also saw a review the other day at 4SysOps of more freeware called Screenshot Captor, which is for single-frame captures and not video, but has annotation tools that look very useful for demonstrating particular features, etc.
I hope some of this is useful...I just happen to have run into this stuff recently, so good timing reading your post I guess!
Created by David Szpunar on 07.08.2007 6:04 pm
Thanks David. None of these are mac apps though :-(
I would use Win if I had to, but I generally prefer to avoid it at all costs
Created by Ian on 07.09.2007 9:59 am
Ahh...you're one of those Well, most of the freeware's on the Windows side, so my guess is you'll have to pay for it (not for sure, but likely), but I can't help you find it--but I can't help you there. I support about four Macs run by the visual arts/web guys in my office, so break-fix is about as much Mac experience as I get, although I did do a decent amount of Final Cut Pro video editing a few years ago (it's possibly the best video editing software out there if you can afford it, in my limited experience), to the point that advanced editing classes I took only taught me about half new stuff.
Otherwise, I'm Windows from a money standpoint and because that's what the rest of work runs I'd have a Mac too, if I had the money...the most you can learn the better!
Created by David Szpunar on 07.09.2007 10:49 pm
They are expensive, but the productivity more than makes up for it. All that we have are Macs actually and we use Parallels to run Windows as needed for testing and such.
Created by Ian on 07.10.2007 7:17 am
That's what all the Mac users say Like I said I'd buy a Mac if/when I can afford one (which isn't likely to be soon), because I like learning and working with new things. But it will take me a while before a Mac could approach the level of productivity I get now with Windows. If you go to this Joel on Software page, from his UI book, and search for the word "Pete" and read about 6-8 paragraphs starting with his first mention, it describes my perspective well (and Joel is just darn good reading any time
Created by David Szpunar on 07.10.2007 8:53 am
Ah yes, I've had that quoted to me many times. That defensive quote/link usually makes it's appearance a year or so before the person switches
Created by Ian on 07.10.2007 8:59 am
It's not defensive I've worked with the Mac here and the difference in interface (and especially troubleshooting and figuring out other technical details...because Mac's don't always work exactly right all the time the way some people seem to think...I've even seen them crash!) is big enough to take a lot of getting used to, from experience.
I could certainly get used to the Mac...looking forward to it actually. But staying on budget at home is more important than playing with a new computer right now, or any number of other gadgets I'd love to play with!
Created by David Szpunar on 07.10.2007 9:07 am
It is a big jump, no doubt. Crash? Bah. Never seen it
Created by Ian on 07.10.2007 9:13 am