Get Thee to a Nunnery…or Las Vegas

I’ll be hitting the road with the TechSmith crew for BlogWorld & New Media Expo 2010 in Las Vegas. If you’re attending I’d love to have the opportunity to connect so swing by the TechSmith booth and say hello. If you aren’t attending, but would like to, we’ve arranged a 20% discount for anyone registering with the discount code TECHSMITH.

Interested in learning more about what we’re going to be up to in @ BlogWorld? Check out this short video.

ThumbGenie 1.1.0 Now Generates Embed Code

I updated ThumbGenie over the weekend to support generation of embed code. Now, every time you create a thumbnail from an MPEG4-AVC file or SWF embed code will be generated. ThumbGenie ships with a default “object / embed” code template, but you can easily modify or replace the template with your own code. (more…)

ThumbGenie: An AIR Thumbnail Generator for MPEG4-AVC / SWF Files

One of the not so nice aspects of hosting your own Jing / Jing Pro videos is generating thumbnails that can be used for the “click-to-play” screen that viewers initiate video playback with. My current thumbnail workflow works something like this:

1. Capture video.
2. Save video to local disk (desktop).
3. Open video with QuickTime Pro ($30).
4. Select a video frame and Choose QuickTime’s “Export Movie as Bitmap” option.
5. Open .bmp file generated by QuickTime Pro in Fireworks (beaucoup $$$).
6. Resize image in Fireworks to fit my embed dimensions (embed dimensions are different than video dimensions).
7. Export out JPEG file (.jpg) with some compression applied (trade quality for size).

Jing’s supposed to be all about the easy, but the workflow above is decidedly not. It shouldn’t be that hard to generate thumbnail images from your JIng videos and it shouldn’t be ultra expensive. Enter ThumbGenie, an AIR application, written by moi, that allows you to load MPEG4-AVC or SWF files, select a video frame and generate a thumbnail image as either a JPEG or PNG file. Wait, it gets better. You can apply JPEG compression and scale the exported image down. Best of all its completely free, as in beer. So what are you waiting for, download ThumbGenie and start generating thumbnails pronto!

If you head over to ThumbGenie central you’ll find some helpful “getting started” videos as well as the installer badge.

Embedding Jing Pro Videos In WordPress

I get quite a few questions about how to embed Jing Pro content in a WordPress blog. Rather than typing out a long tutorial I’ve made a couple of screencasts that show you how to get up and running. (more…)

WordPress Automatic Update Plugin Cures Blog Hosting Fatigue

Let’s face it, keeping your own hosted WordPress blog and plugins up to date is a major drag. It’s the type of tedious work that just begs for a big fat easy button.
(more…)