Screen design in RBL
If all goes to plan, above this text you should see an embedded flash movie player. When you click on the movie, you should see me talking through a PowerPoint presentation that I am ‘presenting’ on my iBook. The PowerPoint presentation was captured as a MOV video file using the iShowU screen capture program from Shiny White Box software. I then used Video2SWF from Vertical Moon software to convert the MOV file to an SWF file and associated html file. The SWF file contains the video and a flash movie player. Both of these programs are ‘try before you buy’ and come to a total cost of $65, around £37 in real money.
The quality loss compared with the original MOV movie file is quite high, especially with the drawn diagrams near the start. I need to play with the various variables involved. Converting from MOV to SWF takes a lot of time on my iBook (half an hour to convert a 10 minute MOV). The MOV file will play in Safari when you follow the link at the beginning of this paragraph, I’m not sure if MOV files can be played through Windows Media Player on Windows XP, or if a QuickTime download is needed.
The next move will be to set up a YouTube account and see if the Web side tools can convert the MOV file with better quality.