When you’re determined …

I thought that yesterday’s post about the YouTube video preview was kind of neat.  I even demonstrated it with this screen video capture.

Now, as Paul Harvey would have noted – there’s more to this than you would think.

I mean, how hard could it be?  That was my thought as I started to write the post.  Actually, quite a bit later, I had a solution.  But, it wasn’t easy with the computer that I was using.

I had booted my computer into Windows 10 to do something else when I thought that I would write the blog post.  It should be easy; it’s just text and I throw in a screen capture.

Not!

I seldom do new things on Windows 10, opting instead for working in Linux Mint on this computer.  But, I was in Windows, so why not?

Writing the post was easy.  Now for the screen capture.  At present, the feature only works with Opera and Chrome.  I loaded Opera and did the mouse over and it worked fine.  Now to capture the video.

I was stumped.  I don’t typically use Windows for something like that.  But, for a quick capture, Jing is my go to application on the Macintosh.  It does capture a part of the screen and there is a video capture element but I’ll be honest; I hadn’t used it in a long time.  So, I was off to download the Windows version, installed it, and then did the process of animation and capturing it.  When I went to save the result, there was only one file format for it.  .swf

Sigh.  Well, I could always beg forgiveness.  As I tried to upload it, WordPress indicated that it didn’t like this file format.  That’s probably a good thing, for a number of reasons.  It’s actually too bad since the file size was pretty small.  I had to find something different.

I popped up the Application Menu and started to look for something that looked like it would do the trick.  Nothing I had installed set off any bells until I got to the Xs.  There’s the XBox application.  I remember reading somewhere that this application could do screen capture.  That makes sense for gamers who want to do their thing.  I found the article; did a quick enough read to get a lead on how to do it.  Off I went, the animation in the browser looked good but when I asked Xbox to do the screen capture, it complained about the video driver on the computer.  It was a fair enough complaint; this is an older machine.

What to do?  What to do?

Then, I remembered that I had installed the Nimbus Screenshot & Screen Video Recorder extension in the Chrome browser.  Down went Opera; up went Chrome.  Maybe this will do the trick.  I’d never used it to capture video before.

I went through the process again and it worked perfectly.  I had myself a .mp4 file that did what I needed.

Back I go to WordPress and try to upload the file.  Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t allow for uploading .mp4 files in the free version.  Rats.  When I look at the size of the file, I could see why.  Even though it was a small video clip, it still was a fair sized file.

Maybe I could just ask you, the reader, to try the experiment for yourself.

Nah, that’s the coward’s way out.

There has to be a better way.  Maybe .mp4 isn’t the best solution after all.  Really, I just needed to show the video from 10 000 m.  It’s the description that is the most important part.

How about .gif format?  I wonder if I still had that .gif maker on this computer.  But, before poking around and looking for it, I remembered my old web friend, Zamzar.  Its claim to fame is to convert one file format to another and, sure enough, there was a .mp4 to .gif option.  I just had to wait a bit for an email link to grab the resulting file.

That’s OK; I had other things to do.  Within seconds though, I had the notification that the file was ready.  So soon?  I downloaded it and it worked beautifully.  WordPress liked it; it was small; and it did the job I needed.

And, as Paul Harvey would have said, now you know “the rest of the story“.