Why D’Arcy Norman is a minor deity – reason #27 (Screencasting on the Mac)

D’Arcy Norman works in the Teaching and Learning Centre here at the University of Calgary, and has helped me with at least 26 projects or ideas prior to this, but I just wanted to share the latest with you. 

As you know, I’ve been looking for a tool that will produce screencasts on the Mac that can be output to SWF (Flash), which I think is the best format for delivering this type of content via the web.  (See YouTube for proof of concept).  There have recently emerged a number of tools for the Mac that do one part or another, but lack something vital, either audio, or the ability to output to Flash.  That’s still the case, but in the comments to yesterday’s post about Screen Mimic, D’Arcy casually pointed me to the ffmpegX Video/Audio encoder for OSX.  And it worked!

We’re definitely not there yet.  But it can be done!  The encoder is simple enough, but does require that you wrap the resulting file (FLV, not SWF) in an SWF player.  So once I recorded the screencast (I used the demo version of iShowU for this demonstration), I transcoded it from .mov to .flv using ffmpegX (fast!), uploaded the .flv file to the server here, and then called that file using Flash Video Player 2.4, as recommended on the ffmpegX site. 

And here’s the pudding:

You’ll have to use your imagination a tiny bit ’cause I recorded a big screen and then squeezed it into that smaller video box, but rest assured it could be resized or shown full size for legibility; I just wanted to prove to myself that it could be done.

So yeah, we still need a single tool that will make this simple for anyone to do, but I’m confident such a tool will emerge by the end of the year.  Someone with some Apple Scripting skills could probably even tie a couple of these tools together, but I’m just getting started on this stuff and am supposed to be packing for vacation right now, so I’ll leave that to someone else

Thank you, D’Arcy!