Note: Jing Pro is no longer available for purchase. Learn more.

I thought it would be helpful if I created a sort of FAQ about SWF--the video format used in the free version of Jing. If you have more questions, post them in the comments and I'll update this post.

What is SWF?
It stands for Shockwave Flash, and maybe you've heard of Adobe Flash Player or played some Flash-based online games. It's a file type intended to deliver a compact file size containing multimedia content to the web.

What are strengths of SWF?
As it pertains to Jing:

• It works great for web delivery, and we thought primarily people would use Jing to communicate via Internet-related tools
• It's available for Mac and PC
• It's royalty-free (obviously a big plus for a free product)
• It's lossless--meaning that you get really crisp and pixel-perfect screen capture capability.

What are some weakness of SWF?
As it pertains to Jing:

• It's not a true video format. This means hardly any video editors will touch it, and when a lot of people double-click the file, their computer doesn't know what to do with it...people have to know to put the file in a web-browser. (Learn how to automate this.)
• It's not good at capturing high-motion content. In other words, it does a lot better capturing your typical computer programs than a video game or, ahem--online video.

Can I resize my SWF video so it fits better in my blog or website?
You sure can. I recommend reading this post.

So what might the MP4 (technically, MPEG-4 h.264 AVC) format offered by Jing Pro mean to me?
In short,

• It's better at capturing motion.
• It's generally editable in third-party applications.
• It's usually a smaller file size.
• It's a standard video format--works on any number of sites that support video.
• It's playable outside of a web browser. In other words, people can just double-click the file and generally have a great experience. Double-clicking a SWF file is generally unsuccessful because it requires a browser to play it.

You can learn more here and see some side-by-side comparisons of the differences here.