Most people know that you can create desktop demonstrations in .WMV files using the Windows Media Encoder 9, a download we have off of Microsoft.com.
What most people don’t know is that we made a pretty massive change IMHO to the default codec used for capturing the desktop screen. Between versions 7 & 9, we changed the codec for Screen Capture.
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SCREEN CODEC 7 & 9
In Screen Capture 9:
- Lossy desktop video capture
- Moderate frame rate
- Optimized for high speed processors with heavy bus throughput. This includes the bus for disk I/O.
In Screen Capture 7:
- Lossless desktop video capture:
- Low frame rate:
- Optimized for moderate speed processors with moderate bus throughput.
One of the things that you’ll notice is that the quality of you Windows Media Screen 9 captures are totally variable. It depends on the processing power available at the time of the capture, meaning that if your processor sucks or you’ve got bad bus throughput to the disk (maybe multiple apps are trying to write to the disk at the same time) then you’ll find that the desktop videos you do won’t be very clear and you’ll need to "throttle up" the bandwidth of the video capture itself to get a decent encoding. This can make the videos expand in size far beyond what you’d anticipated.
Meanwhile, Windows Media Screen Codec 7 had a lower frame rate with a lossless image which diminished data throughput and thus the processing needed, but it would also always deliver a perfect video experience. It just might seem a little jerky but the bandwidth required was always consistent.
UH… IN ENGLISH PLEASE?
In short, Windows Media screen capturing is not optimized by default for folks that don’t care about network streaming bandwidth, such as corporate users. If you are streaming off of a internal network or reading the video off of a CDROM, who the heck cares about bandwidth? As long as you can make out visually what the user’s doing and you’re not saturating the pipe, what really matters is the clarity of the recording! And Screen Codec 7 is much better at that than Screen Codec 9.
Screen Codec 9 is better if you’re going to be encoding material to post on the Internet and bandwidth really is an issue. For example, if you’re encoding a demonstration that’s 30 minutes long and will be streamed to 100 people from a single server, you probably want to minimize the bandwidth of the stream so that it doesn’t consume your outbound connection entirely.
SO WHAT DO I DO TO GET THE "CLEARER IMAGE"?
Thought you’d never ask: Simply read the article below. It explains how to install a fix to allow for the usage of Windows Media Screen Codec 7 in Windows Media Encoder 9. What it’s really doing is tuning Windows Media Screen Codec 9 to behave identically to Windows Media Screen Codec 7: Lossless quality, lower framerate.
FIX: Images in content appear less clear after you upgrade to Windows Media Video 9 Screen codec
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/837171/
Kurt Shintaku's Blog 