Easily Record Your Desktop Screen

3 days ago I talked about how to easily capture desktop screenshot. A person with the nickname MIND MOTION left a comment asking me about free video capture program. Well here it is…

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)


Seriously, I love this freeware. CamStudio is only 1.3MB in file size and it does the job. Since I am a technical guy, most of the time I need to guide my customer step-by-step on how to detect and solve their problems. Trust me, doing that through the phone can be tough sometimes. Showing them exactly what to do on their screen is sometimes the quickest and clearest way to communicate. CamStudio is able to record the region that you specify or full screen. If you have a microphone, you can record your own voice so it can go together with the video recording.

You can also use CamStudio to:
* Create demonstration videos for any software program
* Creating a set of videos answering your most frequently asked questions
* Create video tutorials for school or college class
* Record a recurring problem with your computer so you can show technical support people
* Create video-based information products you can sell
* Record new tricks and techniques you discover on your favorite software program, before you forget them

The default keyboard shortcut to start recording is F8. Stopping the recording is F9 and canceling recording is F10. You can change the default keyboard shortcut by going to Options -> Keyboard Shortcuts. If you take a good look, there’s an icon at CamStudio. It’s located at the same row as Record, Pause, Stop icon. If you click on that, it will switch to “Record to SWF”. Clicking that button again will switch to “Record to AVI”. Weirdly, there’s no such option on the menu bar. You can ONLY switch it by clicking on the SWF icon.

A small note on a problem with CamStudio. A number of people have mentioned having trouble viewing SWF videos generated by CamStudio. It turns out there’s a bug which means you can’t see anything if you try watching them with Netscape or Firefox (Internet Explorer works fine) … The next update (2.2) will fix this but until then, here’s a temporary workaround:

Open the related HTML to the SWF you’ve just generated and look for the line starting with the “EMBED SRC” command…
Change the Width and Height values in this line to match values in the line starting with “OBJECT CLASSID”.
Save the file and you should be good to go…

[ Download CamStudio ]