Selecting a Video Format to Support Teaching of Swimming

A computer application that supports the teaching and learning of sporting techniques is presented. It was developed as a tool to assist sports trainers in identifying, analyzing, relating, and evaluating the learning of sporting techniques. At times trainers fail to visualize all the details of an athlete’s technical gestures, mainly because of the speed of the movements. Based on this concept of observational method, the developed software is simple to use and includes digital videos in a natural form for trainers who are not computer experts. To select an adequate video format for analyzing sporting techniques, compression tests and video compression with different codecs were made. Once the format had been chosen, its compression was tested at different video qualities with the selected codec. To verify the functionalities of the developed tool, the chosen sport was swimming. The results obtained with the tool had excellent usability, since most of the functions were mastered without problems by the trainers.