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…

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.

• 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!

• 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.