LibCasting

So I tried the free Jing Project software from Techsmith and posted an example a few weeks ago. Jing is free to download, available for Mac and Windows computers, and (if you register to share your Jing screencasts) comes with a free account on Screencast.com. I was impressed to see that the free account did not expire in 60 days (as it would if you just went to Screencast.com and registered for a free account) but did not expire until 2015). The free account comes with 200MB of storage and 1GB of bandwidth, which seemed generous enough.

Alas, it is not so. Despite a recent change intended to help reduce bandwidth consumption, I am now over. After 339 views of my 3MB screencast (for 2 minutes and 39 seconds, which seems about right for that length of a screencast), I hit the 1GB limit. So what happens when you hit that limit? I received several email messages ahead of time warning of the approaching cap with offers to upgrade my bandwidth, for a fee ($21.95 for 100GB, which would be more than enough but too pricey for my needs). If you choose not to pay, the screencast is just no longer available until the next month’s cycle starts. See the big blank spot in the post (assuming you look before Oct. 29) for how it displays when it has been embedded.

I do not blame Techsmith for needing to fund the service, but this should be a caution for anyone hoping to use Jing as a completely free screencast option. If your screencast is large and/or even moderately well viewed, you are likely to need pay the price for the appropriate level of hosting. Do remember that Jing is in beta and Techsmith may well change the terms or provide other alternatives. At this point, if you want to use Jing, another option is to plan on hosting the screencast on your own Web site.

Unfortunately, the ease of using Jing to produce and share a screencast gets lost if you want to try this approach. It is still easy to record and save, but Jing just saves a single .swf Flash file. While you can just upload the .swf and point to it with a link, it gets more difficult to embed it on a page with a site’s navigation features, branding, commentary, and other content. My solution, which may not work in all browsers, was to build a page and then use the following code to embed the .swf:

<object classid=“clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000″ width=“627″ height=“391″>
  <param name=“movie” value=“FILENAME.swf”>
  <param name=“quality” value=“high”>
  <param name=“bgcolor” value=“#FFFFFF”>
  <embed src=“FILENAME.swf” quality=“high” bgcolor=“#FFFFFF” 

width=“627″ height=“391″ type=“application/x-shockwave-flash”></embed></object>

Note that the width and height elements need to be set in two places, and you need to know what those dimensions are.  You can see this backup version hosted on this site, but producing a page like this took much more time than using Camtasia Studio, Captive, Wink, or other screencasting software that produces both an .swf and the HTML page container.

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