Hey everyone, I was wondering what your thoughts are on using video as the medium for tutorials. We over at JSONData.com just finished are overview video of our website and we were wondering if we should also make a video tutorial as well. Do you think that people would rather have a video instead of a document?

I personally prefer having at least code to work with. That said, if you created a tutorial that has both, video and text, I’m most happy with it. But for me a video tutorial isn’t as good as a text tutorial for it isn’t searchable (with text search) and you don’t know the whole flow of the tutorial. Plus you really cannot copy code from a video tutorial to your code that you’re creating on the fly.

However, I guess, many people nowadays are way too lazy in reading any text so they prefer having someone presenting the information in a proper way - which in this case would be a video.

My opinion on video tutorial is that they NEED a text backup to accompany them.

Make every attempt to use the highest resolution possible.  Offer the video in a downloadable version, since watching a tiny image of a video monitor during streaming is really defeating the purpose. You might have a big monitor to watch it with, but I don’t and I suspect many others still use laptop size screens for video playback.

Finally, I uses Linux and Adobe Flash format is no longer a viable option for linux.  I would like to get video tutorials in .mpg or .mp4 formats, which I can play under linux.  Any format supported by HTML5 is also welcome.