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…

The primary push occurring right now is to do away with the windows media encoder dependency. We have working code for this but it is not yet polished for public consumption.

This is going to be an extremely high quality encoder. I’ve interacted with countless people who have noticed the ‘pixel perfect’ nature of the screencasts that the freescreencast.com recorder makes. The difference lies in the CODEC we use, which is the Flash Screen CODEC. We didn’t invent that, we just are one of the few people using it. This CODEC presents certain challenges, mainly a fine-line trade off between file size and quality. There are two primary methods of compression with this CODEC, one of them being a bit more complicated to optimize, the other being color quantization. We have had some heavy investment into color space theory and have come up an algorithm we are very proud of that compresses color spaces in a very human-perception friendly manner.

The holy grail we judge by is screencast recordings of Photoshop tutorials. That is our gold standard: can we make it look good, have high quality, and keep file size reasonable? Our tests have shown that we can.

Audio is also a major problem. Audio normalization and noise suppression are also in the works to help bring out those faint voices. We’re also looking for a good algorithm for ‘pop’ suppression for those of you who like to be close to the mike.

We also hard at work on the next version of the website, and I’ll touch on some possible features here. I hate to mention features that don’t yet exist as that’s just ‘vaporware’. Here’s what we’re pretty sure you can expect:

  • As before, if you’re willing to share you ‘cast with the world, we’re willing to host it for free.
  • If you don’t want to share, we’ll have a pay-for option where you can either have embed-only hosting or managed obfuscated urls.
  • Linking of a series of casts in to a ‘castlet’ (like a booklet). Short screencasts are better, so some things require a series of casts.
  • Limited HTML in descriptions
  • Limited editing (trimming of casts)
  • Searching of the site!

We’re also working on a commercial version of a hosted service for those of you who want to use the FreeScreencast.com functionality in an organization or business. We can be your hosted screencast solution for a reasonable price, especially compared to current ’single user’ software packages without hosting.

So… thanks to all of you using the software, we appreciate it. Special thanks to those of you who have provided feedback, we appreciate that, too. Please contact us if you have any questions or comments…