The Blog of Brad
Posts tagged screentoaster
ScreenToaster News
Mar 23rd
Back on December 2 of last year I wrote about ScreenToaster.com. If you don’t remember the service, you can get more information at ScreenToaster.com or in my previous post about them. Basically they are a website which does screen captures in video without the need to install another program. (Assuming you’re running a modern browser on a somewhat recent system [ScreenToaster actually uses Java])
I got an interesting email yesterday about some new features:
- Upload your screen captures to Youtube… in HD!
- Download your screen captures as
.movfiles. - A new API (this seems the most exciting to me, personally)
They’ve also added much more capability (to quote from the email):
>What changed since February :
- New categories and subcategories
- Four levels of privacy
- Direct upload to Google Video for featured videos
- Download in .swf file formats
- Record from external VNC servers
- Accelerated or slow-motion playback / Pauses during recording
- Spread on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Digg
- Bookmark it on Delicious, Stumble Upon, Yahoo Buzz and Google Bookmark
- Send your video by mail
- Suggested videos on the video pages
- Branded profiles
- Search filters: “most commented”, by “language”…
- Custom RSS feeds
This is, in a single word, amazing! ScreenToaster is already one of my favorite and essential utilities, but now it’s many time more interesting.
Back in my earlier review I complained about the lack of audio recording, that’s been added, the frame-rate seems to have improved, and now the videos aren’t ‘stuck’ in ScreenToaster with these new export functions (to Youtube, download as .swf and .mov files. I can’t wait to use all of this!
One last comment: did I mention this is free?
Screentoaster: Mac OS X Test
Dec 30th
I clicked around the web management of this blog to test the powers of ScreenToaster.com. I found that ScreenToaster works just as well on Windows Vista as on Mac. For more information on ScreenToaster, see here. Basically, for those who don’t know, Screentoaster.com is an online java-based video screencapture utility. You just have to get an account, use a java-enabled machine, and have a somewhat fast internet connection to upload the video the screentoaster.com. You can embed your videos in your personal web pages.
ScreenToaster.com First Look
Dec 2nd
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.

