Monday, February 04, 2008

Open content brought to you by open source software

So I finally stopped my addiction to Camtasia and started using Cam Studio. I also weaned myself off of the flash video encoder and I'm using ffmpeg instead for some post-processing. All of which is talked through in a screencast about screencasting here.

For reference purposes, here's the settings described/shown in the video:

CamStudio

use: Camstudio lossless codec v1.0
60% quality
set key frames every 30 frames
capture frames every 50 milliseconds
playback rate 20 frames/second
uncheck auto adjust

audio options
22.05 bytes/sec, mono, 16 bit
interleave every 20 frames
PCM compression

winFF (FFMPEG)
flash video (flv) for Web use (16:9) for base settings
bit rate 256
frame rate 10
video size 800x600 (or desired)
check 2 pass
audio sample rate 22050
audio bit rate 48k

Corresponding websites

Sample screencasts using these settings:
http://inst.usu.edu/~aewalker/videos/flash5270.2/

Camstudio software:
http://camstudio.org/

WinFF software (comes with FFMPEG built in):
http://biggmatt.com/winff/

The downside:

Camstudio is PC only (ugh) and of course, there's the fact that I use flash for the front end (not at all open source, and that I mostly use this for screencasts about a course on Flash).