{"id":1021,"date":"2008-03-18T17:40:01","date_gmt":"2008-03-18T17:40:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/03\/recording-windows-media-screencasts.htm"},"modified":"2008-09-09T19:31:00","modified_gmt":"2008-09-09T19:31:00","slug":"recording-windows-media-screencasts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/03\/recording-windows-media-screencasts.htm","title":{"rendered":"Recording Windows Media screencasts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Next month, I’ll be delivering a couple of presentations on behalf of the Windows Server Team UK<\/a> at the Microsoft UK user groups community day<\/a>. It won’t be the same without Scotty<\/a> (who first invited me to take part) and I’ve never presented to a large group before so, frankly, I’m more than a little nervous (and if I’ve asked too many questions in one of your presentations – I’m thinking here of Eileen<\/a>, Steve<\/a>, John<\/a>, James<\/a>, Jason<\/a>, et al. – now is the chance for you to get your own back).<\/p>\n

Anyway, I’m working on some insurance policies to help make sure that the demo gods look favourably on me – one of which is pre-recording some of my demos. In truth, it’s not just to make sure that the demos run smoothly, but also to condense 10 minutes of activities down into 2 (watching progress bars during the installation of Windows components is hardly exciting). So, I’ve been recording some screencasts (aka. blogcasts, vodcasts, vidcasts, video podcasts, etc.) to fall back on. It turns out to be quite simple – based largely on a post that John Howard wrote a while back with recorder settings for Windows Media Encoder<\/a> (WME).<\/p>\n

First of all, download a copy of Windows Media Encoder<\/a> (I used 9.00.00.2980) and it seems to run fine on my x64 installation of Windows Server 2008, although I’ve just noticed that there is an x64 version available that I will install and use next time.<\/p>\n

Next, drop the screen resolution and colour depth. John recommended 800×600 pixels at 16-bit colour depth but I used a slightly different method, capturing just one window (a remote desktop connection to a another machine, with the RDP connection running at 800×600). I also found that the capture was a little taxing on my graphics hardware, so it was worth dropping back to the Windows Vista basic display settings for a while (I reverted to Aero once I had captured the video).<\/p>\n

When WME loads, it starts a wizard to create a session – I chose to ignore that and configure session properties manually. The key items are:<\/p>\n