Stepok Development

There are many users wrote mail to ask us adding a feature that recording sound from speaker. And we have to reply them one by one.

This issue is not a problem at all because SCREEN2EXE or other sound recording applications are recording ‘default sound inputting channel, which for most case is microphone.

So this is an issue about how to set the ‘sound inputting channel’ in system. So it is not part of the software can do, but related.

First of all, you should know some basic knowledge about windows sound mixer. The Windows sound mixer which you can set in ‘Control Panel’ of system, include 2 pages. 1 for speaker output called settings of playing, and 2 for sound inputting called settings for recording.

To record speaker sound, simply set input source by check it to channel ‘Stereo Mixer’ which means the sound sending to the speaker. On your computer, it may be other similar name, which depends on your sound card. Anyway, ‘mixer’ means mix sound up and sending to speaker.

But, bad news to tell you that some sound card just not support ‘mixer’ as inputting. That means forget it, you can not record speaker sound, change to another computer please….

Now we know how to record speaker sound, can we record speaker sound with microphone together? Sure you can! Check both speaker mixer channel and microphone channel…wait a moment, seems I CAN NOT do this?! The system doesn’t allow me to check on 2 or more channels in inputting page.

You are right; the system can not record 2 channels at same time. But there is still a way to do this. Switch to ‘speaker output’ page, and this page allows you play sound from multiple channels at same time, (that’s what mixer do). Then you can check microphone channel to make the microphone inputting played though speaker, mixed with the original speaker sound. And then record ‘mixer’ as sound source. Now, problem solved, you can record both of them. To be noticed, in default , microphone channel does not appear in ‘speaker’ page, you can set it in the property page where you switch between ‘speaker’ page and ‘inputting’ page.

A demo movie show the above steps,

In the new v3.0 SCREEN2EXE/SCREEN2SWF, a new function called ‘Audio re-dub’ is introduced in editing. This article will tell you why add this function and how it can help us adding/replacing the sound of a program.

The original idea of this function is coming from a very common issue that, when recording a tutorial with sound, it needs operating on computer while making speech at same time. Most people can not focus on both of them, so they either make mistake in sound or in operation. And have to record again and again… painful, isn’t it?

What if we split the recording into 2 steps?

Step 1, focus on recording on-screen part. And maybe you can record a reference sound too, it maybe not good enough for final using, but can help you catch the right beat.

Step 2, give sound to the recorded movie. In this step, focus on recording sound.

Obviously, That is easier now, right? So we developed this ‘Re-dub’ function. When clicking on ‘Start Re-dub’, the preview will start, and recording start too. It will play while recording sound until the movie end. Then the new sound track will replace the precious.

This function is also useful to:

1, Add sound to projects, which are recorded before without sound.

2, Translate the sound part to another language.

3, Editing the sound, replace it with a new one.

There are 4 status when a visitor open your webpage to see a flash demo. This article will tell you more about those status.

Status 1: Flash object detected. That means the browser support flash and can play the movie. Then there will be a black area at the place of movie.

Status 2: Flash in loading. The flash program will load at least 120K program head before it can be played. On most computer, it takes 1-5 seconds.

Status 3: Ready for play. User can click on play icon to start it. A preview thumbnail is shown on screen if you set.This status will not turns to next step until user click on the button.

Status 4: Initializing:Decoding the first frame and preparing data. It will take 1-5 seconds depended on speed of the PC.

Status 5: Play (while continue downloading). The swf file can play before the downloading finished. You can see a green line growth from left to right to indicate the downloading progress. With this buffering feature, user can start play without waiting. You can also set to play until downloading over in ‘Setup’ dialog when producing flash.

The previous SWF movie created by SCREEN2SWF has a black initiative window and a ‘play’ button in center. This is clear but some visitors may not know what it is and would not click to play.

Now with new release v2.9 you can choose the new feature ‘preview’ to enable a preview effect before ‘play’ clicked. This is helpful to catch more clicks from visitors.

This option is in setup dialog of SWF format. You can simply uncheck/check it to disable/enable this feature.

We have introduced the new version of Screen Anytime, computer monitoring software recording user sessions into video log files. Screen Anytime 4.0 features a built-in HTTP server allowing managers to view records remotely using an Internet browser.

The advantage is very clear. In before version, managers have to login the server with RDP to view and play the records. It is trouble, slow and hard for managing the users on server (because you need add account for every one who need to see the records). Now, they can just open their browser to visit address like, http://<server address>:3580, to manage and play the records online. And you can create Screen Anytime users that is used to login the web system and different from the server users.

And this build-in http service is totally independent, that means you don’t need IIS running at all. We cut unnecessary features and protocols to make sure it is more safe from attacking.

In future version, we will enhance these online access features to add more functions include configuration, reports and statistics.

Although SCREEN2SWF is designed to recording minutes level short tutorials, but it still support video over hours in theory.

Some users report that SCREEN2SWF dead after, for example, half hour or 1 hour, recording. And we spend some time to find what’s wrong and turns out to find no error in their.

The reason the users feel no response is, SCREEN2SWF will process a ‘parsing’ work after recording to build an index table for editing. This will take several seconds if the video is not too long. But when the video is over 1 hour, this process could take over 1 minute to go. And during it, user can not click on any button, looks like dead in interface. Look carefully, the progress bar are still running until parsing over.

The new released v2.8 SCREEN2SWF/SCREEN2EXE adds new features to support full-screen replay. It is a very useful feature for demonstration.

For SWF format, click on ‘Setup’ button of ‘Save Page’, the last step, you will see 2 new options as following,

Check/Uncheck each  of them can enable/disable the full-screen and information button of flash program. If you will insert this SWF file into HTML manually, please notice that, ‘allowFullScreen’ property of the object MUST be true, like this,

<OBJECT classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,124,0" width=600 height=460>

<param name= "Movie" value="a.swf">
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true">
<embed src="a.swf" width="600" height="460" loop="0"
quality="high" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" menu="false" allowFullScreen="true">
</embed></OBJECT>

Self-play exe movie has full-screen button too, and viewer can click to switch to full screen, and press ‘ESC’ to back to normal status.

Normally on one html page we place only one flash demo. But sometime, we have more than one video demo for one product, for example, we have 100 videos, so it is obviously we can not build 10 pages for each of them. Is their any easy way we can put them on one page with a index that visitor can select and switch between them?

Using a dynamic page will be easy to do such a job, but a static HTML page could be better. Is that possible? The answer is yes, for example,

http://www.stepok.net/eng/tutorials.htm?SWF=rc_compose&width=640&height=574

The above page has 7 videos created by SCREEN2SWF, an index link lying on right of the page. It is an html page but receive parameters from URL. If this is what your need, the following article will show you how to do this.

First we need a JavaScript file named swfobject.js which can create flash object dynamically.

It is an open source JavaScript under MIT license, you can get it at:

http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject/

With this script file, we have to add some code on the page,

First, a function between <HEAD> and </HEAD>

<script type="text/javascript">
function getQueryString(name)
{
if(location.href.indexOf("?")==-1 || location.href.indexOf(name+’=')==-1)
{ return ”; }

var queryString = location.href.substring(location.href.indexOf("?")+1);
var parameters = queryString.split("&");
var pos, paraName, paraValue;

for(var i=0; i<parameters.length; i++)
{
pos = parameters[i].indexOf(’=');
if(pos == -1) { continue; }
paraName = parameters[i].substring(0, pos);
paraValue = parameters[i].substring(pos + 1);
if(paraName == name)
{ return unescape(paraValue.replace(/\+/g, " ")); }
}
return ”;
};
</script>

Then, at the place you want to show the flash,

<script type="text/javascript">
// <![CDATA[
var so = new SWFObject('<path>' + getQueryString("SWF") + '.swf', "swffile", getQueryString("width"), getQueryString("height"), "9,0,124,0", "#000000");
so.write("flashcontent");
// ]]>
</script>

Assume this html is
http://www.yourwebsite.com/showflash.htm,
now you upload your SWF file to the folder in ‘<path>’, for example path could be ‘tutorial/’, now you have a video named “awf”, with widh=500,height=350. The you upload to :

http://www.yourwebsite.com/tutorial/a.swf

After that, the link for this swf file is,

http://www.yourwebsite.com/showflash.htm?SWF=a&width=500&height=350

And when visit the above URL, the navigator will automatically load the “a.swf” with right size. Now you can upload the rest of other videos, just changing the parameters can visit each of them.

The size is important, remember to set it right. It is controlled by SCREEN2SWF-Save-Flash setup dialog.

Some users complain that the quality of movie is not good, and send us samples. We find that it is the reason is same, that they have not disabled their desktop wallpaper before recording.

Our recorder based on an optimized compressing algorithm will check the contents of recording. If a photo, image is find on most area, it will adaptively choose a lossy compression way to process it instead of lossless for buttons, icons and menu… So, the quality drops.

Wallpaper is not necessary but costs more file size when illustrating something to others. We recommend disabling it before recording for 2 reasons. First, the quality improves a lot. Second, the smaller output file.

Here is a comparison between use wallpaper and not.

Left, with wallpaper, 130K                Right, without wallpaper, 20K

[SCREEN2SWF]

The new v2.6 SCREEN2SWF/SCREEN2EXE has optimized its workflow of sound to make the quality better when outputting SWF format. And, make it possible for future version to adding functions like ‘sound editing’.

The previous workflow of sound recording is,

You can see that when outputting SWF format, there are 2 compression operations. Each compression loss quality, so 2 processing loss double information. To improve that, in v2.6 we change it to,

So, the quality of sound in SWF format improved!

There is another issue we have to explain about sound in SWF. That is the sound in SWF have to be in MP3 (Mpeg Layer 3) coded. Because it is the only format that flash player supports. The MP3 format is designed for compress music, which have more high frequency information. But most sounds in a screen recording program are voice only. Then the MP3 need more bits to compress the high frequency data.

Currently, we use 8Kbps GSM coding in EXE and AVI format, which works great for voice sound. But we have to use MP3 which have at least 16Kbps (2-4 times than GSM) in SWF. That cause the size of SWF file may little bigger than a self-play EXE format. You can choose the quality of MP3 sound in v2.6, the flash set dialog to find the balance between size and quality.

SCREEN2SWF