FreeScreencast.com Blog

I have great news! Two announcements: First off, the screencast recording software will have a new name: Castcordia. Second, we are in the works of fully open sourcing the software and to assign the copyright to the Free Software Foundation. Educational institutions have embraced freescreencast.com in a big way and we find this to be a very high calling. After much discussion, we have decided that giving the software to the world is the right thing to do. I will share more info as it becomes available.

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We finally updated some back-end code and now the site should load much faster. It still isn’t as fast as we would like, but it is a definite improvement.

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Our SSL cert incorrectly expired but it has been renewed. The issues people have been having should go away now.

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First, some stats. Since going live, we’ve had:

Over 8000 downloads
Over 2500 accounts created
481 Screencasts shared with the world (although quite a few of those are ‘tests’).

FreeScreencast.com has also been shown at two different educators conferences.

By all accounts, we are very proud of how far freescreencast.com has come. We are also hard at work on the next version of the software and the website…
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This screencast does a great job of pointing out a complete lack of ‘help’ on the website and asks an important question: does the screencast recording software have a time limit? The short answer is no. The long answer is a bit more complicated, and will involved factors like bandwidth, software stability, free hard drive space, and how critical it would be for you to lose your work. I’ll answer this way: I know of no technical limit on the screencast recording capabilities. However, I, for one, would not use the software to record something I could not afford to lose. We’re not mission critical ready: we’re beta. It works -almost- all the time. How’s that for a honest answer?

For those you who do want help, on the left hand of the website:

If you’ve got questions, we’re only a click away. As for the lack of help? Our focus goes where our clients want it to. There’s a long list of items that we’re working on: help is not on there because no one has asked for it. I will, however, whip up a FAQ.

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Those of you uploading screencasts in the last few days have been encountering an error. It went unnoticed (by us) for a while but has now been resolved. No data was lost and I manually finished the validation process so the thumbnails and preview images are all working fine now. The fix consisted of 43 characters of PHP code. I apologize for any inconvenience.

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Our website host will be physically moving the server cluster that hosts FreeScreencast on Friday, February 8th, starting at 10 pm Pacific time and lasting around 8 hours. Our server cluster will be in a new data center and performance should improve drastically.

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Moodle has come up more than a few times for me in the past few weeks, and after investigation I discovered there are many screencasts about Moodle, but apparently not much talk of using screencasts in Moodle. So I installed Moodle and embedding from FreeScreencast.com worked right out of the box: How to embed a screencast from FreeScreencast.com into Moodle.

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Here’s what we’ve accomplished since the last status update:

• Tags are working. You can add tags to your screencast and click-around on tags.
• View counts - you can now see how many times a screencast has been viewed. That’s not page loads - that’s views, so each full play through counts.
• Sorting options under ’screencasts’. The default views is ‘Recently popular’ (which I will most likely change to ‘What’s hot’) which is based on views in the last 72 hours. You can also sort by recently added and all-time popular.

What we’re working on:

• The account side of things needs to be cleaned up: the screencast list is horrible and not using our new templating code. Each screencast is also going to get a ‘details’ page that will allow for some more detailed viewing history and better editing.
• Tags have a few things left, such as a tag cloud and searching on tags.
• Work on the new screencast recording software continues. Development continues at a good pace.
• Searching is still not active but could be with a small amount of work… out of all the features we’re working on, this one is requested least so far.
• Comments and ratings - we’ve had a few people ask for these now, so they are on the radar and development on the web side for these features has started.

As always, please keep the feedback coming in. We appreciate it!

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Development continues. The holidays always slow things down a bit, but here’s what we’re working on right now:

• Tagging - this is an obvious no brainer for the website that we didn’t include on the initial release under the philosophy of release early, release often. Several clients are calling for this and we’re listening. Once our core groups of beta testers declare it good, we’ll bring this to the production area.
• A whole new screen capture component - Right now the screencast recording software relies up Window Media Encoder to do the actual screen capture. This is powerful technology, but it fails in several important areas. Both us and our clients don’t like the additional download, either. So a big push for myself has been to remove this requirement and take full control of the screen capture. I’m happy to say I have proof-of-concept code working for this.
• Another aspect of our own capture code is doing capture of the mouse. I also have working proof of concept for this, which I might even do a post on, as the code and concept is kinda cool.
• Search - we have custom paid-for google search ready to go in the background. In order for this to really work like we want it, we have to get the google site-map up and running also.
• This blog.

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