CamStudio
CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on
your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and
using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean,
mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs)
Here are just a few ways you can use this software:
- You can use it to create demonstration videos for any software program
- Or how about creating a set of videos answering your most frequently asked questions?
- You can create video tutorials for school or college class
- You can use it to record a recurring problem with your computer so you can show technical support people
- You can use it to create video-based information products you can sell
- You can even use it to record new tricks and techniques you discover on your favourite software program, before you forget them
Don't like the sound of your voice? No problem.
CamStudio can also add high-quality, anti-aliased (no jagged
edges) screen captions to your recordings in seconds and with the
unique Video Annotation feature you can even personalise your
videos by including a webcam movie of yourself
"picture-in-picture" over your desktop.
And if all that wasn't enough, CamStudio also comes with its own
Lossless Codec that produces crystal clear results with a much
smaller filesize compared with other more popular codecs, like
Microsoft Video 1.
You have total control over the output of your video: you can
choose to use custom cursors, to record the whole screen or just a
section of it and can reduce or increase the quality of the
recording depending on if you want smaller videos (for emailing to
people, for instance) or you can have "best quality" ones for
burning onto CD/DVD.
But all of these features would be worthless if CamStudio wasn't
easy to use ... fortunately that's not the case. CamStudio can be
learned in a matter of minutes and comes with a comprehensive
built-in helpfile, so if you do manage to get
stuck, you can simply hit "Help" and get the answers you need.
So where can I get it and how much does it cost?
You can download and use it completely free - yep - completely
100% free for your personal and commercial projects as CamStudio
and the Codec are released under the GPL (for more details on this
license, click here.)
There are no royalties or any monies to pay - although if you do
use it for a commercial product, I wouldn't say no to a copy of
whatever you produce.
CamStudio's
History
CamStudio was originally released by a company called RenderSoft
who were subsequently bought by a company called eHelp who used
some of the technology in their program, RoboDemo ...
Some time later, eHelp was bought by Macromedia who wanted
RoboDemo (which was to become Captivate) ...
Knowing that CamStudio did some of the stuff RoboDemo did for
free (mainly export to streaming Flash), they released a newer
version which fixed some bugs but most importantly, removed
certain features. Gone was the ability to create SWFs, added was
the requirement to register to use it, and over time, links to the
various webpages that had CamStudio and its source code, became
broken.
However, I managed to find an earlier version complete with the
related CamStudio video codec (comparable to Techsmith's excellent
TSCC), the source code for both and just put the website up so
people could download them ...
Click "DOWNLOAD NOW!"
Comment on Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail: