I just created a Captivate session demonstrating how to create content on my Drupal site, Christmas Australia

Captivate creates SWF content. That’s usually ok, except when I recorded the demo, I used a custom screen size to fit exactly what I wanted onto the screen. That meant that my Super Video converter could not convert the SWF file into another format such as MOV, or MPEG.

So I had to find a site that would allow me to upload SWF videos. Nope, YouTube doesn’t like them, nor Google Video, nor Vimeo. Photobucket will let you, but only for paid upgraded members.

So I Googled swf video sharing sites, and found Megaswf.com. Beautiful!. A few site that lets you upload SWF files – how rare is that – any gives you an address to share it from. It even reformats the size, so it will fit better.

Not sure if there are any bandwidth restrictions, but this is a particular niche. I’ll do a correctly formatted one for other Drupal functions, convert those and upload those to Youtube. Later.

Pretty happy. (You can watch it at Creating Content on Drupal if you like)

The standard code provided by youtube has a width of 425 pixels.
Historically videos were converted for display at 320 pixels, although the new beta version for newly uploaded videos apparently goes up to 480px.
This post is a temporary experiment at embedding it into wordpress at 480×400pixels. It does break this layout, but it’s just an experiment.

The video used in this sample was captured from an 800px display, as any smaller than that would make navigating through xcart too annoying. The appearance is still pretty pathetic, which just reinforces the need for a voiceover. So I’ll add that later, and reupload the videos.

I guess we’ll let clients ask for the swf to be sent to them directly, at the original high quality resolution, and 800px width.

Just for fun, I’ll also embed the 425 version, to see how the quality differs.

Feedback so far is that the code provided by youtube makes it look clearer. So it must be extrapolating the larger screen size, making it blurry. Oh well.

We’ve made some sample training videos about using WordPress, recorded them using Adobe Captivate, which creates Flash SWF files.

But to upload them to YouTube, we had to convert them to .AVI files, as YouTube won’t let you upload .SWF files.

And then the actual encoding process used by YouTube is pathetically low quality, traditionally 320×240 pixels. Which makes everything so blurry that you can’t read the text.

I experimented with recording my training sessions at 640, 800 and 1024, to see if it made any difference. They were all still blurry.

YouTube has recently increased the quality slightly – up to 480×360, which is still pretty poor.
Initially you could only view the higher resolution versions of newish videos, by appending a parameter to the end of the address – &fmt=18. However they have now placed a link underneath videos that have the higher resolution version available, so that if you have a slower connection you can view the old 320px version, but with a high speed connection you can view the improved Beta version.

Still not really good enough for use in training though. For clients we will probably stick with hosting Flash videos through Adobe Connect, and avoid the double conversion process.

Or investigate other free video hosting solutions.