about screen capturing, transparent codec installations

[Jaset]

Hi all,

as a regular reader of there forums I’d like to ask anyone in here for some useful suggestions about a codec problem. A friend of mine and myself are prepairing a small project for a medium sized company which wants to present their latest software titles with videos.
In the first multimedia production for this company we used the TechSmith video codec for capturing the look and feel of the software and put some commentary to it (without visible quality loss). The result was pretty high quality videos because that’s what the codec was made for. Quicktime, XviD, Divx, MPG and such were not suitable for this kind of video production because there are not optimized for screen capturing and low motion videostreams. TechSmith is optimized for this, that’s why we used it.

But we had serveral problems with the final product. At some point users weren’t able to install the codec (while being under winnt4, xp, 2000 without admin rights for example) or netscape users didn’t find flash plugins etc.
We want a multimedia presentation for screen capturing with as less additional installations (for codec and stuff) as possible.
Right now we need some sort of a solution which allows us to transparently register codecs (so that the user wouldn’t realize it) under those os’s. Or even another piece of software which might be useful for this kind of production (screen capturing).



Did anyone do such stuff before or has some suggestions or smart advices for us?

Thanking in advance
Jaset

[phrentec]

I agree the techsmith codec is well optimized for screen capture and fits well to keep the size down at lower color depths as well. Recently I came by this post http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&postid=163879 where bsplayer allowed me to play a divx file on a computer that didn't have admin rights to install the divx codec or modify the registery.

So with the case of bsplayer working with the tscc codec (dll) I couldn't get it to work. In my bspfilters.dat I included this

[BSPlayer filter def file] AddFilter tsccvid.dll,{74F5614A-8A8C-43B4-8CC2-4B4EFAF4A6C5},TSCC

So I moved on to try it with Media Player Classic but still had problems. It only works when certain tscc registry entrees are already on the computer, like from a previous install but I tried it on a clean slate computer and couldn't get it to work.

If anyone can figure out how to bundle Media Player Classic with tsccvid.dll (the TSCC codec) please help.

Regarding "another piece of software which might be useful for this kind of production (screen capturing)." the other options for screen capturing that I know of that don't necessarily require the use of a'codec' are demoforge (http://www.demoforge.com/priv/setup.exe) , viewletbuilder (http://www.qarbon.com) , and robodemo (http://www.ehelp.com/products/robodemo/)

[Jaset]

hi there, thanks for your thoughts on this one.
but we have finally finsished this project and are very satisfied with the results. I wrote an installer.exe with the help of the nullsoft nsis installer system to ask for administrative rights, operating system and installed mediaplayer version (you can have the src code and modify it to your needs).
depending on those settings and combinations we started different .html files including tscc videos for mediaplayer 6.4 and 7, and for the rest (wmp 8 (additional silent codec install)and 9)we converted our tscc videos to wmv medias which in the end made it look like a very state of the art project (I speak about the used techniques). but we learned some things for the future. on the next project we will be doing it all with flash, because the techsmith page offeres awesome flash and shockwave support.
check it out ;))

greetings..

[phrentec]

good to hear that,
yes the flash support that camtasia is well done but the last time I tried it which was a while ago I remember that the ouputed flash file didn't have a seek bar (scrub bar, slider to skip through the frames). do you know if they have added the seek bar recently?