Aral Balkan

View the full-resolution version at screencast.com.

Jing is a wonderful, free, cross-platform app from Techsmith for recording screen captures and screencasts. It lets you share your recordings immediately (without a separate encoding process) through Techsmith's screencast.com screencast hosting service, Flickr, and via your own web server with FTP access.

One thing I couldn't get it to do was to embed by recorded screencast with smaller dimensions on my blog. This is because Jing sets Stage.scaleMode = "noScale" in the SWFs that it creates.

The way around this is to use Burak Kalayci's excellent Action Script Viewer to change the "noScale" value to "showAll".

Watch the screencast above (which uses the technique itself), to see how to do it.

I do hope that Techsmith removes that line of code from their generated screencast SWFs as it will make it much easier for us to embed Jing screencasts on our blogs and share them and make an already-excellent product even better!

Comments

• Thanks for the post!!! This is really helpful, though I wish there was a free way to do this as well. @Tony, that's FANTASTIC news!!!! I can't wait for the next release of Jing... Love it!

  by Luis Benitez on 2008-10-22 00:42:14

• I just tried to download the ASV demo and I get all kinds of warnings when I open up my SWF file. Also, under utilities, there is not View/Edit Constants option. Perhaps the new AVS is not compatible with the latest Jing videos?

  by Ben Nadel on 2009-05-08 14:12:39

• Cool, good to know. I'm guessing if you knew of a Mac equivalent to Action Script Viewer you'dve mentioned it?

  by Paul R Pival on 2008-08-13 16:43:51

• If you don't have a compare, is there any chance you could make a 1 second all white screencast and then perform this fix on it and then email them too me? I don't have the tools to do this but if I can see the changes, I can possibly write a delphi program that will modifify the binary appropriately. A one step process would be great, but I need to know how to identify the code that must change. I can even make it a drag and drop operation where you just drop the file on the icon and a new resizable one will be created by streaming the old file into a new file flipping the switch along the way. I just don't have any way to find where that switch is hiding in the raw file. Any help that you could provide in getting me before and after files would be great! A short file would be cool as your tool may change more than just the switch and I would prefer having a really small amount of changes to search through. However any before and after files you have laying around would be fine too. Even if it is just a long swf sitting on your desktop, I would likely find the area of the file I need as I suspect the change would be in the header or tail of the file. Thanks for your time and effort. Again this was a good find on your part.

  by Brian Layman on 2008-12-19 16:42:28

• I commented on this a while ago ( http://blog.lyraspace.com/?p=38 ) and they got back to me saying they appreciated the feedback and would look into it blah blah ...

  by lee probert on 2008-08-13 14:45:37

• I wanted to touch base everyone that this has been addressed and will be available in our next release, along with some other very exciting features. I appreciate you pointing out a temporary work around and please know we recognize the inconvenience this causes and are working quickly to make amends. Kind Regards, Tony Dunckel Product Manager The Jing Project

  by Tony Dunckel on 2008-09-26 19:44:27

• Great that I found this post as I want to do the same thing for a new SaaS app that we've released. The app just doesn't look right when you squeeze it down too much, so I want to record at high res, then scale as you have done. My issue is that I'm not a Flash developer, thus I'm not sure I want to spend the $80(US) for the Action Script Viewer for the 1 or 2x that I need to do this. Any ideas on how to get around this? or an alternative open source version?

  by Kenny on 2008-09-26 11:19:27

• Yeah I love Jing. The only thing I would love to see is support for flv output. Currently it only generates swf files with uncompressed full images for everyframe which makes it practically useless for long screencasts but i guess that`s not what it was made.

  by Benz on 2008-08-12 16:43:57

• I'm curious, what program are you using to display the keystrokes on the screen?

  by rkitect on 2008-08-21 13:02:32

• >> I’m curious, what program are you using to display the keystrokes on the screen? For the Mac, Mousepose does this: http://www.boinx.com/mousepose/overview/ And it's a feature within Screen Flow.

  by Zeusman on 2008-09-05 22:49:40

• I don't suppose you have done a binary compare between the b4 and after. It sure would be neat if we could hex edit these bad boys change a 01 to an 03 or something and have done with it... I'm not so sure about the $80 output either. Though I hate to re-record what I've already done...

  by Brian Layman on 2008-11-11 19:59:25

• Just an FYI, I purchased Jing yesterday (April 7th, 2009) and the issue doesn't seem to be resolved - changing the embed code size still clips the video instead of resizing it. Maybe Tony Dunckel could comment on this?

  by Mo Flanagan on 2009-04-08 18:34:51

• What gives? What happened yo? I be needing my resized videomajigs.

  by Concerned User on 2009-11-04 22:02:09

• Thanks for this! Just ran into this issue.

  by r-a-y on 2009-12-14 23:06:53

• At time of writing, if you substitute bootstrap.swf with jingswfplayer.swf in their embed urls, your screencast will finally scale correctly. Don't bet your company on it though.

  by Graham King on 2009-11-06 01:07:57

• Hi, I saw this question from a tweet. I thought I would throw out another post from the Jing blog that may help: http://blog.jingproject.com/2009/11/embed-code-smaller-videos.html Mike Curtis, TechSmith

  by Mike Curtis, TechSmith on 2010-09-21 20:21:12

• Hi, can we still substitute noScale with showAll in the latest version of the Jing swf file to get it to scale or does this not work any longer? I tried it with a software called SWiX and did a find/replace but the resulting swf still won't scale (it crops). The user can right click and select "Show All" themselves, but how many will know that? Not very elegant obviously. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

  by Dave on 2010-11-04 16:52:15