THE MUSIK-ZONE
Software Reviews - Jing

Jing is a unique little free video recorder that sits up at the top of your browser (you can move it anywhere you want). It really has no instructions, but is pretty simple to use. It allows you to record anything that comes through your video card and onto your browser screen- with a 5 minute limitation.

NOTE: This is not meant for downloading long videos. YouTube videos, for example, can be up to 12 minutes long. Google Videos can run for hours, so this won't work with those. You can download it here (opens in a new window - close it when you're done and you're right back here!)

 It looks like a little yellow sun that clings to the top, bottom or sides of your browser - wherever you drag it. It has three "rays" coming down.

  • The first is to control your video recording. When you move your mouse over the first ray (a "+" sign), the word "Capture" pops up. It immediately gives you a resizable window - but this is not the first thing you want to do! You'll never know what happened to the video you just recorded. The first thing you want to do is to click on the third button and set up your preferences, so you know where you're saving the file.

  • The second is a "History" button which shows a miniature catalog of what you've downloaded.

  • The third is called "More" and is where you make your settings. It has buttons for Done, Feedback, Preferences, Help & Quit.

    Under Preferences, you can set up:
    - file-sharing for Screencast.com, Flickr, FTP or File
    - whether to launch on start-up (I choose "yes")
    - a Hot Key (I use the default "F12")
    - show Launcher? (I left it at "yes")
    - FTP - I haven't messed with that one

    You want to click on File, where you will see:
    - select target directory where you want to save your videos
    - sharing link to send people to watch your video
    - an image embed code, and
    - a video embed code.

    The target directory is all you need to know for now, the other windows (now blank) will fill up after you've recorded your video.

Now, you're ready to go back to the first button when you're ready to actually record. You have more buttons here - Image - Video - Redo and Cancel. When you hit video you start recording video, with audio, if any. When done, hit the STOP button. You will see a little button called FILE - click that. It saves a link to your clipboard and if you paste it into something (NotePad or web creator) you'll see this:

C:\Users\Jim\Videos\_Jing\Jing tutorial-01.swf

It has been saved as a Flash (SWF) file. Now you can either use it as a flash file or convert it to another format (WMV, MOV, MPEG4, etc.).

The second button is an EMBED button. Use this one to place it on your web page like this:

embed src="http://www.yourDoman.com/Jing/Jing tutorial-01.swf" HEIGHT=284 WIDTH=863>

Notice that it didn't work. What you got was just the code. The program has a little problem. It needs a "<" in front of the word "embed." They should fix this sometime, but for now, just go to your HTML mode and insert it yourself and it should work fine. ALSO - and this is important - change the src="http://www.yourDomain.com/Jing/..." to the directory where it will end up. What I do is save the .SWF file to the folder where this page you're now reading is located - and simple remove everything in front of the "Jing tutorial-01.swf..." Then when I upload the page file (what you're reading, I also upload the .SWF file at the same time (keeping it in the same folder) and it finds it and plays it properly. It ends up looking like this:

< embed src="Jing tutorial-01.swf" HEIGHT=284 WIDTH=863>

... producing what you see here. Just a brief video as I used the program to video me writing the instructions. (I needed to be able to see both the web creator and the video process at the same time). I use MS FrontPage, so when I saved the page, it let me also save the .SWF file (in some other folder on another hard drive) to the proper folder where I want it. Simple enough!

As you can see, it's pretty good for tutorial videos, but it also works when you want to record short videos off the Internet, as you can see with this 2 Mb example. It is a bit over-sized, but I haven't experimented with shrinking it. You must be careful to keep the width-height in the proper proportions when you do that.

I'll have to a special tutorial on how to operate this whole program.

 


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