Hosting recommendations for technical screencasts

Question

I am asking this question on SO because a similar question was asked here and migrated to SuperUser, but the answers it got there were more about screen sharing than hosting screencasts. I'm hoping that some of you have faced (and solved) this issue before...

My team is putting together a bunch of technical screencasts, and we are currently hosting them ourselves. We would much prefer to host them externally, to take advantage of a bigger pipe, geographically distributed data centers, and better uptime.

The screencasts are typically less than 10 minutes.

Is there a programmer-centric screencast hosting solution? Would you recommend YouTube? Vimeo? Something else?

Answer 1

Since Jon's answer two years ago, there have been a few additions to the screencast market:

• Screencast.com, by TechSmith. The makers of Snagit, Camtasia, and Jing have a place where you can host your Screencasts at any resolution. It's not as straightforward as Screenr, but it provides you many options to upload your videos. You can upload by file or directly from Snagit 11, Jing (Free), or Camtasia.
• YouTube and Vimeo (Pro) continue to be good options if you're looking for a hosting platform and they now both support a large range of HD formats as well as supporting HTML5. The drawback (or benefit?) is that your video is going to be converted to their playback resolution(s) rather than your source resolution. Snagit 11 will even upload directly to YouTube now.

Screencast.com seems like a good option if your main concern is recording screencasts on the fly and getting them uploaded quickly.

YouTube and Vimeo are probably better choices if you want your videos to be visible to the widest possible audience.

Answer 2

While Vimeo is more of a professional site, YouTube offers HTML5 / H.264 video playback support for all videos, so they'll play on iPhone. Vimeo currently doesn't support that on user videos, and is planning on adding it as a pro feature in the future.

Answer 3

If you are really concerned about 1-to-1 pixel resolution in your screencast, Vimeo Pro is not the best choice. My files had an exact 1920 to 1080 resolution and I exported them from Screenflow in "lossless". It appeared very crisp on the Mac in Quicktime Player, but after uploading to Vimeo Pro, turning HD "on", I could not read the details.

Vimeo is quick, but they have a compression good for movie scenes, but bad for small computer screen fonts. I am trying screencast.com since they leave the file "as is".

Answer 4

Personally, I prefer to see videos on something like Vimeo rather than YouTube or a similar site. Vimeo has a certain air of professionalism about it while still be convenient and user-friendly. Also, you can put embedded videos on your support pages if you wish or simply link to the videos in FAQs or forums. It makes it very convenient. Again though, this is just MHO.