Windows Media Encoder – Designed to Inspire

Today, I am testing out the (free) Windows Media Encoder as a means of capturing video and audio on my computer screen (kind of a poor woman's Camtasia). Yes, it is Windows only. Overall, the learning curve to get WM encoder going was not too bad. For whatever reason, Microsoft is gearing the software solely to "professionals", but I think they are missing a large audience who would like a down and dirty way to capture video by labeling it a "professional" product. There is still a huge mountain to climb to perfect the quality, but I was able to "produce" this 3 minute first attempt in less than an hour. I am also playing around with ways to host the video. I uploaded my first attempt (in .wmv format) to Google video, YouTube and my site's server. At first blush, the Google video and YouTube options are way to small to read the screen capture. However, it took all of 30 seconds to upload and embed in a blog post, so I will keep that in mind for quick projects that don't require detailed video. Here is a link to the file that I uploaded on my web server. Not bad, but I'm going to tinker around with ways to view from other web based players.