Caution: This software, by far is the best and freely available, yes true opensource / freeware tool to record all on screen activities along with Audio.
From business presentations to marketing demos, to creating fun videos to doing some serious teaching and training, camtasia is a fantastic screen capturing / recording tool. Only catch, you got to pay for it. I wanted a free alternative that would do what camtasia does, and my search ended with CamStudio.
CamStudio is not just free, but its Open Source, under GNU’s GPL. If your requirements are moderate, then Camstudio beats Camtasia any day, but however after having used both, I personally feel Camtasia, any day is a much better tool compared to CamStudio when it comes to making professional videos.
It’ll be harsh on CamStudio if I say “Pay peanuts and you get monkeys”, because in this case you pay nothing and get quite a load full. What is better fitting for this amazing software is that; “Best things in life are always free” 🙂
With CamStudio you can record all your screen activities and related audio activity from the system. You can also record audio from your speakers. All the recorded data can be stored in two formats, either in the form of industry-standard Audio Video Interleave (AVIs) or can also be saved as Streaming Flash Videos (SWFs), this is an advantage as SWFs consume more bandwidth when compared to AVI’s.
CamStudios, home build Loss less Codec ensures the video is crystal clear. Their codec is well optimized too which results in smaller file size when compared to videos made by other popular codecs.
You do not need any prior programming experience to record a video or capture a screen shot. There is an extremely useful ‘help’ section which answers most of your questions.
Haven’t tested the CamStudio 2.5 yet, but it claims to support multiple languages, mouse-button-based visual feed back, recording from audio speaker (wait .. thought they already had this feature 😉 ).
Now if you come across the question : “How Do I Show The Technical Support People What’s Happening on My computer?” — simply record what exactly is happening and share the video with them 😉
[ Download CamStudio ]