You’re right, we don’t yet have ratings or comments, because that’s not what our clients are asking for. I’ll tell you what we are working on, however.

Video quality. You pointed it out yourself in your post on Webinaria, the video is less than ideal for screencasting. Freescreencast.com overcomes that two ways: we use a codec specifically for encoding the screen (Adobe Flash Screen Recording Codec), which is ‘pixel perfect’ and we provide a large play back area.

The screencast recording software currently depends upon windows media encoder to actually capture content. This is not ideal for a variety of reasons, two of which are quality of capture and software stability. Almost all the bugs in our software are caused by trying to control the windows media encoder software. The codec used by Windows media encoder also switches between two modes of capture (lossy, and loseless, we want to stay in loseless mode) which both decreases quality and increases file size.

So we want to remove our dependency for WME and are doing just that. We have working code that is being prepped for beta release. Quality of encoding will go up again.

We have also made the decision to open-source the code base for the screencast recording software and rebrand it as Castcordia… this is actually the first public mention I’ve made of this, as the process is quite slow and I don’t like to talk about ‘vaporware’.

And on the website side: Tagging is nearly live on the production site and we increased the resolution of the flash player area (again!) on the website, both based on user feedback. After that will be providing detailed video watching stats to the content creators (this is for those professors out there who want to see if their students are watching).

So we have quite a bit going on and development is active and being driven by community feedback. Thanks for mentioning us on your blog.

Jason

…