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For the past three years, I have been doing custom-made video screencasts for private consulting clients. These are moving captures of the images on a PC screen with my own voice-over narrations about IT-related products (you can see the entire collection here). And lately, more vendors have stepped up their own efforts to produce their videos as a way to explain what their products do, or as Mike Lee has said, what they might eventually do. There is also a growing awareness that these screencasts can be used as way of product documentation and support.

Let's talk about what tools you need, some best practices that I have gleaned, and some other places to learn more about this craft.

YouTube just announced that users can now edit videos from within the browser and save changes. The editing tool enables rotation, stabilization, brightness, contrast and temperature controls, as well as adjustment of the start and end points. It also offers several color effects, which the YouTube team developed in collaboration with Google-owned photo editing site Picnik.

Previously, if a YouTube user wanted to change a video, it had to be edited with other software and re-uploaded, meaning all the views, comments and links would be lost. Not only does built-in editing offer a much more convenient workflow, these basic features could probably replace outside video editing software altogether for everyday users.

Vimeo, probably the best site on the internet to watch artistic short videos, announced an expansion of its lean-back feature called Couch Mode today. The feature, which offers a browsing interface that was initially optimized for Google TV, can now be enjoyed anywhere. Couch Mode makes it easy to move from one video right into the next, without using the traditional website navigation. You can access it from the corner of any page on the site.

Vimeo's Ryan Hefner said in a blog post today that Couch Mode "works great" on iPads and Android tablets. In my testing of the feature today I did not find that to be the case.

Code School, the collection of online participatory course we covered previously, has a new course called Functional HTML5 & CSS3. The course consists of videos introducing concepts, followed by online tests to prove you've learned the material. You can't move from one lesson to another without correctly answering the questions. The course costs $45.

For those wondering, the course title means functional as in working, not functional is in functional programming.

Tango, a cross-platform mobile video calling startup, is today announcing its first expansion to a non-mobile platform: the Windows desktop. Sometime later this summer, the new PC software will debut, joining Android (phone and tablets) and iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad) as the third major platform launch for the company over the past nine months.

If there's one thing that keeps me coming back to Facebook, it's the photos. Admittedly, I've largely abandoned Facebook as my social network of choice, but it's still the primary way I can see what all my old high school buddies are up to. But photos often get lost in the shuffle of Facebook status updates, and there's been no easy way to visit Facebook and look at just the photos or videos that friends have shared.

The New York City startup Pixable has built apps (for Web and for mobile devices) to improve the way in which we consume the photo feed from Facebook. Pixable makes it easier to view friends' photos, listing them by friend but also by category. You can see, for example, new profile pics, most popular pics of the month, photos from family, as well as photos that are popular on Flickr and Instagram.

And now Pixable has added a new category and a new media type: videos. Pixable's categories distinguish between videos that friends have uploaded themselves (home movies 2.0, if you will) and those that they've shared (from YouTube and the like).

Yesterday Cisco announced that it will lay off 6,500 employees and sell a manufacturing plant in Juarez, Mexico to Foxconn to shave off an additional 5,000 employees. This follows Cisco's decision to discontinue its Flip camera products and its Eos video/social platform.

It wasn't long ago that Cisco was expanding into new markets and burning through billions of dollars acquiring companies like WebEx, Tandberg and Flip. So what happened?

"Mobile video is shaky by definition," says Norman Winarsky, VP at SRI Ventures, part of Silcon Valley-based SRI International, a nonprofit performing sponsored R&D for governments, foundations and businesses. "A shaky image affects bandwidth and reduces the experience," he explains.

But with the technology Google has licensed from SRI, image stabilization will no longer be a concern ... at least on Android. Google is implementing the SRI tech in its Google Talk application, to deliver better video on Android 3.0+ devices. And that may be only the beginning of Google's computer vision plans.

The Internet Archive's entire collection of digital videos will now be available in HTML5 as well as Flash, the organization announced today.

The Internet Archive will be using Kaltura's open source video platform in order to deliver the 500,000 some odd digital video assets housed at the Internet Archive. Kaltura's video player identifies whether a device and browser supports Flash or HTML5 and will deliver the content accordingly.

According to a new report from network management and video optimization firm Bytemobile, mobile video now accounts for between 40% to 60% of the total mobile data traffic on operators' networks. Half of the video consumed comes from laptop computers, iPhones, iPads and Android devices, the company found.

But here's an interesting side note to that data: When broken down by device, iPhone users see more video data traffic than those on Android, or even on laptops.