Archive for December 2, 2008

I heard about this great idea for a screen recording service, ScreenToaster.com, from a TWiT Army Canteen member, wazneeni, and I immediately signed up for a beta code. Early this morning I recieved the code and was left the day to ponder what this would be like. So, I finally was able to test this. Again, this is a first look–I can’t make a final verdict, besides this IS a beta service for now…

Basically the idea of this is to allow a computer user of any flash-supporting operating system/computer take screencasts. You could use software such as CamtasiaStudio (Windows), Snpaz Pro (Mac), Screenflow (Mac), but these work only on one machine, require major CPU/GPU power, and are operating system dependent. Screentoaster though is like most sucessful operations today: operating system independent–take Youtube for example, anyone on any operating system can upload and view videos (limited to Flash supporting operating system though.)

Overall, what they’re doing seems simple, they somehow take video of the screen or an application, use the encoding power of modern flash to compress the near HD video and upload it to the ScreenToaster servers as a flash embeddable video. I used this to take a demo video of my screen playing back video (Flash video, coincidently). The quality was fine, great picture quality, poor frame rate. The biggest drawback yet seems to be the lack of audio capture live with the screen. I will get to the online editing tools later. I’ve attached a sample video I took.