Franchu’s lair

In the beginning there were iPods…. and it was good…
Then people started to put online small audio files to be heard in the iPods and when the trend caught on, podcasting was born as a fusion between the concept of iPod and broadcasting. People started to create audio files that were effectively broadcasted them in an asynchronous way to their audience thanks to the internet.

As broadband has become more popular and portable audio players have become common gadgets, podcasts have grown in number and can be found easily online covering a broad range of topics: from language learning to political brainwashing, from cooking lessons to amateur music. Feel free to take a look to the podcast gallery hosted by Yahoo!

But today I would like to talk about a new trend that has been gaining momentum in the web and it is being used as a support to online tutorials by providing explanations in a visual way. It is known as screencasting merging the concepts of screen and broadcasting. As you have probably guessed by now, screencasts are a video recording of the screen and an audio track that provides explanations on what is being done in the screen.

It is a power-tool for software tutorials as it allows the creator to explain by showing directly the interaction and the results in a much more visual way than a bulleted list describing the steps that need to be taken and screenshots of each step.

It took some time to get popular due to the fact that video requires high-speed connections for it to be fast enough to be usable in real-time. Now it is possible to view small videos in real-time streaming from a server without needing to wait minutes or hours for it to download before you can actually play it. Lately it has become fashionable to serve them as flash video (FLV) as several online video platforms are using this technology to distribute their content (eg. YouTube, Google Video).

For an example on what screencasts look like, you can take a look at “Best Tech Videos on the Net” and filter by the topic you are interested in (eg. Photoshop tutorials are really nice).

But the main goal of this post is to explain how to create those screencasts with the help of some tools in Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.

For Windows there is a nice FOSS program that goes by the name of CamStudio and provides an easy dialog to record in a video file an area of the screen or even the whole screen. As the video/audio codecs it can use any codec that is installed in your system and they also provide for free a lossless codec that can be downloaded from the page. If you are using Windows I think it is a must have and you can download it directly from the page of the project in SourceForge.

For Mac OSX there is a nice piece of software called iShowU that comes in a universal binary, and it is very easy to use. It has some predefined presets that define the quality of the video capture and the size of the screen. This software is a shareware and can be bought for 15.89 euros. You can download a functional demo from the website, and I can tell you that if you are into screencasting this little piece of software is really a must for you.

For Linux there is a piece of software called Istanbul, but as I have not used it myself I don’t feel comfortable giving advice about it. Anyway being a GNOME application I am sure it will work OK
With these two pieces of software you can record a video that can be edited afterwards to dub some explanations, add some caption text to provide further guidance, cut out pieces of the video that are meaningless for the purpose of the video, …

The difficult step is being able to record the video off the screen, after you can easily do all the editing you want until you achieve the desired result.

Hope you will enjoy creating screencasts and that you will share your creations!

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