ScreenToaster / The Official Blog

Tutorials: Why you need screencast?

If indeed a picture is worth a thousand words then perhaps a screencast is worth a million? Your viewers get to see your application in action just as if you were giving a live demo (but without any annoying crashes or slow-downs!), they hear a friendly human voice and they get to see your tool solving their problem. What could be more convincing?

For evidence for how screencasts can double sign-ups, increase sales, reduce your bounce-rate (by 7%) and halve your support costs, see our 4 mini case studies. In this series we’ll look at all the steps you need to take to make beautiful screencasts that explain your software to your users. It is aimed at anyone selling software or web-applications who wants to increase their user-numbers and sales.

Thanks to Ian Ozsvald from Procast ;)

Toast your iPhone, Android and BlackBerry

Some may have noticed that a new category appeared a couple of weeks ago. At the beginning, we were like "Awesome, let's try a Mobile channel", "Great idea", "But how will user toast their phone?", "Users will find a way, keep cool!". One of our developer said "I used to make yoghurt pot telephones when I was young". So we decided it was definitely a great idea.

Android: If you want to have a rapid look at android's features, you can go on T-Mobile's site, which proposes an online emulator for the G1.

To access to the complete version of the emulator, you can download it on developers.android.com.

Iphone: For an overview of the features of the iPhone (unfortunately not all available), visit merhl.com and simulate calls or check your mail box...
You can also download the complete version of iPhone's emulator at developer.apple.com

BlackBerry: Download your BlackBerry Device Simulator here. Once installed, you can test and use the software as a real phone.

If you know other ways to emulate or record phones, contact us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it !

Here are some examples of posted videos from iPhones and Android:

What bloggers say about us (3)

BBC News, Kate Russell: "This really is insanely easy to use considering the power of the content you can produce - animated movies, audio-blogs, tutorial guides or entertaining spoken-letters to distant friends and family."

LifeHacker, Kevin Purdy: "ScreenToaster, the totally web-based screencasting tool [ ... ], has quietly rolled out a whole bunch of new features, including HD-quality YouTube uploads, Flash/QuickTime downloads, and more recording tools. [ ... ] In a herald of hopefully awesome webapp mashups to come, ScreenToaster is opening up an API in beta to let other developers integrate the service's screencasting tools.

Web Worker Daily, Simon Mackie: "You might like to check out ScreenToaster — especially in the light of some great new features that have been announced today."

PC World, Preston Gralla and Adam Pash: Among the "101 Undiscovered Freebies" chosen by PC World

Download Squad, Brad Lindell "You just fire up the web page, hit record, and ScreenToaster launches a Java applet that lets you record audio and video of anything happening on your desktop. It's great for recording tutorials, presentations, or showing off your video game skills to friends."

Digital Inspiration, Amit Agarwal: "The best screencasting app in the online category."

ClicktoClient, Shama Hyder: A "cool new web service!"

BNet, Dave Johnson: "A video is worth 2.7 million words, assuming 15 frames per second for three minutes and the traditional exchange rate of 1000 words per picture. That’s why video has become an important part of daily life at work, from product demos to training documents. If you’re operating on a shoestring, though, $300 is a lot to ask for commercial screencasting software. Now you can use ScreenToaster, a free online tool that makes high quality recordings of your screen."

How to embed my screencast on my blog?

On ScreenToaster, the publication of a video automatically generates an embed code. What is an embed code? Ok, let me tell you. It is a simple code used to plug a document - a picture, a song or a video - into another document such as a forum, a blog or a website.

Here is an exemple of an embed code:

<object id="demo" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.screentoaster.com/swf/STPlayer.swf" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,115,0" width="425" height="344">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.screentoaster.com/swf/STPlayer.swf" />
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" />
<param name="flashvars" value="video=demo" /></object><div style="width: 425px; text-align: right;">
<a href="http://www.screentoaster.com/">Screencasts and videos online</a></div>

You can find the embed code of each video in the "Spread" box. To insert a ScreenToaster video on your blog or website, you just need to copy the embed code then paste it in your html code. Last but not least: Views of embedded videos are taken into account in ScreenToaster stats. Thats always good to know..

ScreenToaster adds three key functionalities

ScreenToaster officially released today three key functionalities strengthening its position as the easiest and fastest tool to record, publish and spread tutorials, demos, training, lectures and more.

1. Upload your videos to YouTube in HD
Benefit from YouTube's audience and viral potential
Keep ScreenToaster's High Quality on your favourite video platform
YouTube videos now include soundtrack

2. Download in .mov for video editing
Benefit from third party video editing tools to rework your videos
Audio now supported for downloaded files

3. Beta Test our recorder API
Let your users publish videos directly on your blog, forum, website or extranet.
Ideal for collaborative projects, professional tutorials, users' support and feedback management, bug tracking and reporting.

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