The Bioscreencast Blog

One of our motivations for starting bioscreencast.com was the rather poor resolution of screencasts hosted on youtube. Most screencasts on youtube suffer due to the high degree of compression youtube puts its videos through. Screencasts generally convey a lot more when you can actually read and see whats going on on the screen.The fine text, the snazzy antialiased icons , all suffer at the hands of most compression settings , making it rather painful to follow along.

However , youtube recently added a feature that may offer a small way out of this, especially for screencasts. Youtube annotations. What this basically allows you to do is add small text pop-ups on the videos you author ( kinda like VH1s popup video) .

The popups can be finely controlled down to the tenths of a second for appearance and dissaperance and come in three flavors , text box , speech bubble and spotlights. I first heard about this feature on Jon Udells blog where he talks about how this really adds value to screencasts and couldnt wait to try the feature out . I went all out and edited one of my bioscreencast screencasts which explain how to use the “links popup” and “History option” to combine searches on the NCBI for biomedical search and put it up on youtube. Since the youtube embed player still does not support these annotations , check out the video on the youtube site itself by clicking on this link.