Resizing embedded screencasts with TechSmith Jing
View the full-resolution version at screencast.com.
Jing is a wonderful, free, cross-platform app from Techsmith for recording screen captures and screencasts. It lets you share your recordings immediately (without a separate encoding process) through Techsmith's screencast.com screencast hosting service, Flickr, and via your own web server with FTP access.
One thing I couldn't get it to do was to embed by recorded screencast with smaller dimensions on my blog. This is because Jing sets Stage.scaleMode = "noScale" in the SWFs that it creates.
The way around this is to use Burak Kalayci's excellent Action Script Viewer to change the "noScale" value to "showAll".
Watch the screencast above (which uses the technique itself), to see how to do it.
I do hope that Techsmith removes that line of code from their generated screencast SWFs as it will make it much easier for us to embed Jing screencasts on our blogs and share them and make an already-excellent product even better!
The Resizing embedded screencasts with TechSmith Jing article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
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arsen
Sandip Saini
Melatonina Melatonine
Ken Simpson
Gabriela Portilla
Benz
Yeah I love Jing. The only thing I would love to see is support for flv output. Currently it only generates swf files with uncompressed full images for everyframe which makes it practically useless for long screencasts but i guess that`s not what it was made.
August 12th, 2008 at 5:43 pmlee probert
I commented on this a while ago ( http://blog.lyraspace.com/?p=38 ) and they got back to me saying they appreciated the feedback and would look into it blah blah …
August 13th, 2008 at 3:45 pmPaul R Pival
Cool, good to know. I’m guessing if you knew of a Mac equivalent to Action Script Viewer you’dve mentioned it?
August 13th, 2008 at 5:43 pmrkitect
I’m curious, what program are you using to display the keystrokes on the screen?
August 21st, 2008 at 2:02 pmZeusman
>> I’m curious, what program are you using to display the keystrokes on the screen?
For the Mac, Mousepose does this: http://www.boinx.com/mousepose/overview/
And it’s a feature within Screen Flow.
September 5th, 2008 at 11:49 pmKenny
Great that I found this post as I want to do the same thing for a new SaaS app that we’ve released. The app just doesn’t look right when you squeeze it down too much, so I want to record at high res, then scale as you have done. My issue is that I’m not a Flash developer, thus I’m not sure I want to spend the $80(US) for the Action Script Viewer for the 1 or 2x that I need to do this.
Any ideas on how to get around this? or an alternative open source version?
September 26th, 2008 at 12:19 pmTony Dunckel
I wanted to touch base everyone that this has been addressed and will be available in our next release, along with some other very exciting features. I appreciate you pointing out a temporary work around and please know we recognize the inconvenience this causes and are working quickly to make amends.
Kind Regards,
September 26th, 2008 at 8:44 pmTony Dunckel
Product Manager
The Jing Project
Luis Benitez
Thanks for the post!!! This is really helpful, though I wish there was a free way to do this as well.
@Tony, that’s FANTASTIC news!!!! I can’t wait for the next release of Jing… Love it!
October 22nd, 2008 at 1:42 amBrian Layman
I don’t suppose you have done a binary compare between the b4 and after. It sure would be neat if we could hex edit these bad boys change a 01 to an 03 or something and have done with it… I’m not so sure about the $80 output either. Though I hate to re-record what I’ve already done…
November 11th, 2008 at 8:59 pmBrian Layman
If you don’t have a compare, is there any chance you could make a 1 second all white screencast and then perform this fix on it and then email them too me? I don’t have the tools to do this but if I can see the changes, I can possibly write a delphi program that will modifify the binary appropriately. A one step process would be great, but I need to know how to identify the code that must change. I can even make it a drag and drop operation where you just drop the file on the icon and a new resizable one will be created by streaming the old file into a new file flipping the switch along the way. I just don’t have any way to find where that switch is hiding in the raw file.
Any help that you could provide in getting me before and after files would be great! A short file would be cool as your tool may change more than just the switch and I would prefer having a really small amount of changes to search through. However any before and after files you have laying around would be fine too. Even if it is just a long swf sitting on your desktop, I would likely find the area of the file I need as I suspect the change would be in the header or tail of the file.
Thanks for your time and effort. Again this was a good find on your part.
December 19th, 2008 at 5:42 pmMo Flanagan
Just an FYI, I purchased Jing yesterday (April 7th, 2009) and the issue doesn’t seem to be resolved - changing the embed code size still clips the video instead of resizing it. Maybe Tony Dunckel could comment on this?
April 8th, 2009 at 7:34 pmBen Nadel
I just tried to download the ASV demo and I get all kinds of warnings when I open up my SWF file. Also, under utilities, there is not View/Edit Constants option. Perhaps the new AVS is not compatible with the latest Jing videos?
May 8th, 2009 at 3:12 pm