Making a screencast

I posted a screencast on Nascent demonstrating the passage of PDFs and metadata through and around Zotero/Skim/Papers. It took a while to find tools that worked well (even without audio). Here's what I ended up with:

  1. Recorded the video with Jing, saved locally as SWF.
  2. Opened in QuickTime Pro, edited and saved as self-contained QuickTime movie.
  3. That QuickTime format seems to be incompatible with everything, so exported as QuickTime movie using MPEG-4 Video, best compression and current dimensions.
  4. Converted to FLV with ffmpeg.
  5. Embedded into HTML with Jeroen Wijering's Flash FLV Player and swfobject.js.

Note: Compiling the latest ffmpeg snapshot fails with an error in Mac OS 10.4.10: you need to use ./configure --extra-cflags=-mdynamic-no-pic