The Bioscreencast Blog

That was the question that arose after the announcement of SciVee. One only needs to see recent blog posts across the life science blogosphere to realize there there are a number of video-related life science sites that have arisen in a very short period of time. For convenience, I am going to stick to three, since they fill, at least in my mind, complementary roles in the life science video landscape. It also helps us figure out where Bioscreecast fits in the life scientists arsenal.JoVE to my mind is the most ambitious project. Being able to capture experiments (visual experiments) with high quality production is no easy task, but having met Moshe and Nikita recently, I think they can pull it off. The challenge is always going to be on the user end. If we are at the tipping point, people are going to become a lot more comfortable opening up their labs to a video camera. If nothing else, SciVee and JoVE suggest that video is a viable form of communicating formal science.Which brings us to Bioscreencast, and why I think there is a ton of scope here. Screencasts are easy to do, especially compared to other forms of video. In theory, all you need to do is turn on a video screencapture software app and do what you need to do, with the one caveat that recording a narrative at the same time is usually a good idea and probably the one thing that needs some thought prior to starting the screencast recording. We see ourselves as more of an informal user generated site, where the power comes from diverse content uploaded by people with different backgrounds. We all have something to share. Hopefully people will choose to share their software chops on Bioscreencast.Video is just hitting the tipping point in mainstream consumer usage, where more and more people are spending their time uploading material to YouTube, creating content and hosting it on Brightcove or Blip.tv, or like I do, Kyte.tv. In the world of science, there are a number of people, some listed here who have developed platforms that enable those who are interested to take advantage of the tangibility and immediacy of video. The future is now!!!

“We’re announcing a new update to the Flash Player today code named “Moviestar” and it includes support for the widely used industry standard H.264 codec as well as High Efficiency AAC audio support”

So reads the opening statement on a blog post from Ryan Stewart an RIA evangelist at Adobe.

We at Bioscreencast are thrilled at this announcement. As you may remember Bioscreencast.com in its zeroth avatar was offering all its content as H.264 encoded *.mov formatted files that were playable using the quicktime plugin. We chose H.264 since the video quality was amazing for the size of file and also the codec itself was “open”. We were further encouraged by the choice of H.264 by other online screencast offerings such as the video-books at Safari from the O’Reilly stable.

A few weeks after our launch, we started hearing from a lot of our users about issues they had with the quicktime plugin. These were mostly apparent on older hardware using older versions of the quicktime plugin. Prompted by these problems and the ubiquity of browser flash support we decided to bite the flash bullet. The transcoded videos were very viewable but definitely suffered in quality compared to the original mov versions.

We are therefore obviously excited by this announcement today because it could mean that we can have our cake and eat it too. Flash and the flash player are incredibly powerful in the richness of the APIs backing them and there is no denying that Flash rules the Rich internet Application (RIA) roost.

We will definitely be looking into using the new platform to offer screencasts at the best possible resolution.

Hari Jayaram
Bioscreencast.com

Over at bbgm, I have a post about SciVee, a new service from the NSF, PLoS and the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The new service allows scientists to publish video podcasts in support of published work. This is big on many fronts; the organizations involved alone validate everything we’ve believed in here at Bioscreencast, and slowly, video for scientific content and online communication around scientific works, whether published or user generated in our case is going to continue to grow.

The Bioscreencast.com site has serious issues today ( Aug 16th 2007). Our attempts at upgrading our webhost ran into some technical issues. We are sorry for any interruptions and hope we will be up and running soon.

Any uploads that took place in the last 24 hrs are also held up because of these issues.

We apologize for any broken links while we fix this.

We are moving to a faster host. This will allow us to offer our videos in a snappier fashion , experiment with better flash players and hopefully improve your user experience.

While we affect our move our users might experience some “slowness” till the name servers catch up . The move is scheduled for a few hours around 21:00 hr EST in the US (21:00 eastern standard time : 8th of August , 2007).

So bear with us and let us know if anything appears out of the ordinary after the move.

I am sure some of you are familiar with Galaxy,”an analysis medium that enables multiple tools to be applied to existing data in a simple unified way”. We like it for several reasons. It is a cool tool for genomic analysis, but most of all Anton Nekrutenko and colleagues get it. They understand the importance of wikis, blogs and screencasts in science and have embraced the medium. So it should come as no surprise that they understand what we are trying to do here at Bioscreencast. We now have a special category called “galaxy”, which you can track via RSS. There you will be able to find the latest screencasts on Galaxy.

Anton blogs about Bioscreencast at the Galaxy blog. As you can probably guess we are quite excited that they have chosen to serve their screencasts from our site. We have received positive feedback from some others as well. This is exciting stuff indeed.

Well we always seems to have reasons for our silence..but this ones hard to beat. Deepak has been away at Scifoo , the foo camp organized by Tim Oreilly and Timo Hannay from the Nature publishing group.

You can catch the excitement at this years scifoo conference at deepaks twitter feed , his blog or his kyte TV channel . Also the scifoo community does a very good job of collecting posts related to the conference on the connotea a citation manager at the tag “scifoo“.

Deepak also managed to get his nose into a wonderful session by Moshe and the Jove gang on video in the sciences and even talked to Tim O’Reilly himself about screencasting. Sounds like a tonne of fun.Cant wait to hear more about what went on.

Hari for Bioscreencast.com

refs: For a screencast on using connotea to discover content check out this screencast