Announcing MindBites Improved Screencast Functionality

by Alex in MindBites News and Notes, Selling Video Online / 04.21.09

We are excited to announce that we have added new functionality to support the uploading, selling, and playing of screencast-based tutorials. With this additional capability, we have expanded the MindBites publishing and commerce platform to enable the first web marketplace for the buying and selling of screencasts, further empowering the market for technology instruction — from software, to development, to gaming tutorials.

We’ve always viewed screencasts as a great potential content area at MindBites. They can offer a unique instructional experience, they are easy to create, and the technology content they cover needs a rapidly evolving publishing environment. But, to do screencasts well, you really need to process them differently than you do other types of video on the web. Otherwise, they come out all grainy and tough to read, especially when expanded to larger sizes.

Now, screencast videos that are uploaded to the MindBites marketplace can be viewed in a “Actual Size” mode (which will equate to the lesson’s native resolution). This will allow you to see much more clearly what is being selected, which buttons are being clicked, what software features are being used, etc.

2340

Note that the media player’s original ‘full screen’ icon is still available just to the left of the player’s progress bar in the event that you want to blow up the video clip you’re watching to match the size of your screen. This is particularly helpful in the case where the lesson’s native resolution is larger than that of your screen.

full-screen

To properly utilize the screencast upload feature, you need to make sure you check the “screencast” option on the upload page:

screencast-box

With this new functionality, we are also accepting a new file type - flash video files, or .flv extensions. With FLV added, our list of acceptable file types expands to include: .FLV, .MOV, .MP4, .M4V, .WMV or .AVI file formats. If you have any questions or problems uploading a screencast, make sure you contact us!