Just a quick update to everyone still subscribed or lurking. We've moved the show over to discoverXP.com so if you've been wondering where all the videos have been and you missed my original post listen to this mp3 and than join us over at discoverxp.com

A little preamble to next weeks screencast which will be on Customizing XP.

The direct link to the site: http://www.wincustomize.com/Skins.aspx?LibID=1&u=0

I know I know, it's been way too long--I am so sorry. But bare with me, I'm in a new job and I've just learned I'm going to be a papa, so I'm sure you can forgive my absence. :)

I'm back to doing weekly screencasts, I just added a quick number to make sure I still know what I'm doing. And I should have the finale of the gmail series re-recorded next week.

I've also added a new feature-- '60 Second Tip' where I'll do a simple little audio tip that'll last roughly 60 seconds. Kind of a simple: 'hey, did you know' or 'give this software a try' info. It's a simple audio file you can download or play via the mp3 player on the right side of this page.

Sorry everyone, still no new screencasts but I haven't given them up.

I accepted a new job as a .net/XML developer and it's taking a ton of my time--not just the work but getting used to the change.

My hope and prayer is that all will be settled down and I'll release a new screencast on January 1, 2006.

I've also given up the MPC version of the screencast for personal reasons so you will no longer be seeing those--strictly videos directly related to whatever series I'd be working on.

Hey Everyone, just a quick audio file update as to what's going on and why it's been so quiet.

The Red 'O' is everywhere on the front page! Next week I'm going to jump ahead and start working on some XP specific tutorials. We'll see if I have the strength to tackle the Opera Mail tutorial later this month, but I'm thinking it might be in vain so I might axe it all together.

I've got a whole host of XP tutorials lined up, quite excited about them actually, so stay tuned and look for the first early next week.

Looked at my stats today, doing rather well at 300+ downloads the past two weeks from 100+ unique IPs.

Take care all, keep subscribed, and God bless us all,
Mike =)

The audio quality of the past two screencasts are simply horrible. I've pulled the Opera tutorials and am in the midst of re-comressing it. I'll do the same to the Making a DVD tutorial this evening.

I had selected the wrong audio compressor during the initial compression so it went haywire.

So, please download the latest versions which will be available as of tomorrow morning--as the audio sounds much much better. I will update this post to reflect when they've been updated.

Update: I have sorted the audio problem as well as the file not rendering problem and re-encoded them. Unfortunately anything over 15 mins will have to be split into two downloads until the bug in the software is fixed.

The first half is uploaded and will be made live at 3pm PST, the second should be made available at the same time though I'm not going to say for certian as it seems anytime I do something else goes wrong.

Sorry about the temporary inconvenience.
Mike

I can foresee already I’m going to get a few emails as to why people cannot see my screencasts. I capture the video first in lossless AVI video format—each min is about a GB worth of space—not very user friendly. I could compress it in any number of formats but nothing can touch the TRUE mp4 compression of the H.264 codec. I go from a GB/minute to a MB/minute with no loss in video quality. This is nearly unheard of until now.

The H.264 is used by Apple to show off their High Definition movie trailers. And since now iTunes 5, which is the premier platform people use to subscribe to podcasts, ships with the final release of Quicktime 7 it’s a perfect match which I and 90% of the others using video on iTunes take advantage of.

So you will need, at the very least, the latest version of Quicktime to run these videos. But if you don’t have iTunes I suggest you download it instead as not only will it install Quicktime for you but it will make your podcast subscriptions so much easier. Now you’ll never have to go to their site and manually download the podcasts again. iTunes will update and download the latest podcast for you.

But even if you choose not to download and subscribe through iTunes I have enabled an easy direct download link on each podcast. You will however, need Quicktime 7 for any video.

Just wanted to create this preliminary introduction as to what you'll find here.