I am looking for some help from the online community so I can begin posting screen casts (related to creating and editing RSS feeds) to this blog. I am not sure on all the particulars to get this to work best so I thought I’d just put my questions out here in the open in hopes that someone may have the answers that will get me going.

I am planning to use codec H.264 to create the video files.

I am currently capturing with open-source software called Camstudio (appears like it only saves as AVI files).

I am thinking I should be saving files in .mp4 or MPEG and was wondering if anyone recommends a better capture method.

I’d like to capture videos using a standard size format. They have to be pretty big since we’ll be doing screen recordings that will contain lots of text. I have done some tests and I could easily go 900 pixels wide by 780 pixels high but that seems way too big for most screens. I’d like to display at least 600 pixels wide and then what ever height variable goes best with that.

Not sure whether video should be in AVI format, WMV format (I’m running XP), MOV format, MPEG format, or some other format.

I have no problem now recording to AVI and may just have to use a converter to produce the other formats.

Will I be able to stream these files (as they will be pretty large) and will my Linux server recognize the file formats or do I have to make mods to Apache files?

If I set up video at something like 620 pixels by 480 pixels and post them within a blog, will they be too big for most viewers to handle?

Do I want the video to stream off of my server (or some other location) and/or do I want to provide an option to download a higher-quality video file, streaming the lower quality and smaller file on the site?

I created this below video tutorial today but it definitely becomes really low in quality when converted through Google video. I desire a solution that will result in high quality video that’s not a big bandwidth hog.

Working on getting video to display here, still some edits to make before it appears…

Looking forward to some feedback on this topic. I have lots of RSS related stuff I’d love to post videos on after I get these pieces in place.