OK, disclaimer here, I’m not suggesting anyone use the tools mentioned in this post to break any laws. As many of you know, Apple unveiled a new iPod yesterday that can play video. Apparently all the cool (rich) kids will have one. Unfortunately I won’t, so I can’t test any of this out. If all the cool kids are going to have one, don’t you think we should be able to let them watch our library tutorial screencasts on them? Having not seen one, I don’t know if the screen size is too small to make this feasible, but I think someone should try!
Here’s a link to a tutorial (not a screencast) on How to Rip DVD Movies To Your iPod Using Free Software. This method requires a Mac, and seems to want the source file to be on a DVD, which most of our screencasts aren’t. But it does offer some good information on CODECS, resolution, and screen size. I did a quick Google search and found AVS Video Converter, which claims to be able to convert AVI, Real Video, QuickTime, or WMV to MP4, which apparently is what the iPod wants to see. I have no experience with this product (which isn’t free), but it would seem to be what we’d need to get our screencast output into the correct format.
Now I know that Camtasia Studio allows alternate output formats when saving a screencast (AVI, WMV, MOV, Real ), and I thought my original fav ViewletBuilder did too, but I can actually only find SWF as the output option for that product :-(, so unless someone knows of an SWF->x converter we may be out of luck making Viewlets available on the iPod. Hmm, Captivate only allows output as SWF too. ‘kay, Google to the rescue again with the following possible SWF -> AVI converters: WinMPG Video Convert and ADSharit (again I have no experience with these).
OK, so to recap, we need someone with 1) a new video iPod, 2) Camtasia Studio, and 3) AVS Video Converter or similar. If someone can provide me with item #1 I’ll be pleased to take the experiment from there 😉 But seriously, we need to give this a try – who’s going to volunteer?
Update: There’s a page on the Apple site that shows how to create video for the iPod using QuickTime 7 Pro.
Comments
7 Responses to “Screencasts on the new iPod?”
Interesting idea. I might look into this Spring 06. I’m still waiting on systems to install Camtasia… but our MediaCenter folks are progressive, so I’ll kick the idea around.
Brian
Great, thanks Brian! It occurred to me that even more students have cell phones, though I’d imagine these screens are definately too small for screencasts. Who knows though…
I read your aticle and for people that have downloaded AVI videos for PC that are converted for Divx or XVID. I have put together a step by step ttorial how to get it into iPod MP4 format using a PSP converter that is free. If you try to use Quicktime 7 to convert AVI files it will not read them. You neeed to really have your AVI’s in MP4 format to convert in Quicktime.
Here is a link to my tutorial.
http://techgadgets.blogspot.com/2005/10/how-to-convert-your-divx-torrent-files.html
I debated a bit before allowing the above comment, but I sent DJ an AVI file produced with Camtasia and he sent me back an MP4 file converted with the software in his tutorial, so it seems that we can get screencasts on the PSP too, and thus I deem this an educational link!
It looks like you got it all figured out. But just in case… yeah, you can export a video from Camtasia Studio (AVI or MOV) into QuickTime Pro. From there, you export as an iPod video and voila, you got a video file that the iPod can read (M4V).
For those who want to do PowerPoint to iPod, there’s a rule of thumb: if you can see the text from the back of the room, you can read it on the iPod. In other words, no 16 point fonts. If you’re making tutorial videos, just zoom into a 320×240 region (using Zoom n Pan in Camtasia) and then produce the movie as a 320×240 AVI or MOV and it looks pretty sweet.
Troy Stein
Camtasia Studio Product Manager
PQ DVD to iPod Video Converter converts DVD to iPod Video in one click, as well as Tivo2Go, DivX and other other popular video files to iPod.
http://www.yaodownload.com/video-design/video/ipod-video-converter/
The latest version of Camtasia allows you to write straight to iPod format.
http://www.camtasia.com