Good Free Screen Capture Software

[Mike Allen]

During beta testing, I've been trying a lot of different screen capture programs to create movies of what is happening on my computer. Most of the free ones are less than effective.

 

Then I found CamStudio - http://www.camstudio.org - which is a very nice open source (free) program. It includes a module called SWF Producer, that compresses huge AVI files into tiny SWF files (I started with a 73MB AVI and end up with a 643KB flash file.)

 

Just thought I'd pass it along.

[IronKevin]

Have you got good quality results with the SWF? Some samples I saw blur the menu test to the point that it's unreadable. I be interested in any samples you have.

[Mike Allen]

Using all the defaults provided less than satisfactory results with SWF.

 

The flash output resolution seems to be fixed at about 940 x 704, so that's what I set my region to. Also, under Options>Record to Flash Options, I checked "Display conversion options before generating SWF" - which allowed me to modify the default flash settings & change the color mode to 32Bit. That makes all the difference in the world & you don't get the blocky look around moving parts of the image (I don't know why they have the default set at 16Bit, since it gives such poor results.)

 

test.swf

 

I also set the Video quality to 100 percent, since I don't care how big the initial AVI is. I've been playing with the Flash compression - PCM (no compression) doesn't seem to create much bigger files than APCM, so I choose PCM.

Edited August 31, 2007 by Mike Allen

[tlehnhaeuser]

Mike

I used your settings and it works great. I took a 50MB Avi to a 15MB SWF.

thanks

Tom

 

[IronKevin]

They still seem to lack decent anti-aliasing.

[Mike Allen]

They are evidently relying on Internet Explorer to make the SWF files look right.

 

If you use the automatically generated html file to view the flash in IE, it looks pretty good.

 

If you use the auto-generated html file to view the flash in Firefox, you get a blank screen. (They post a workaround to fix the html, so it also works in Firefox. The auto-html has incorrect size information, which IE evidently ignores.)

 

If you simply run the flash file in your browser, it resizes with the window & looks pretty bad most of the time. So it looks like the capture region could be set to any arbitrary size, as long as the file is played with the accompanying html.

 

Still it works pretty well for the price (but I wish there was more control over the flash output.) I suppose the only way to really use it, as is, would be to always play through correctly formatted web pages.

[dhovatter]

Nice software. I played a bit with the settings to get the gradin blue background to be smoother and the edges in the AVI. Works nice. I plan to use the tool to produce some assembly and maintenance videos to put on CD with my how-to manuals for my customers, so size is not really an issue.

Bit like you say for the price it's good.

 

got any more nicely priced software ideas?

[Cary OConnor]

We use ViewletBuilder (from Qarbon) and Captivate (from Adobe) to produce flash movies. They are not that expensive but gibe you control to add captions and such. Snagit is good as well but it produces large AVI files (at least in the older version -- I have not tried the newer version). But you can get free AVI-to-Flash converters.

 

Cary

[tlehnhaeuser]

CamStudio new beta release

http://camstudio.org/blog/general/camstudi...beta-1-released

 

 

[janttila]

Here is another free one that is good

Wink

[Mike Allen]

I tried Wink - and the output is very good. If I were putting together a presentation, I think it would work very well.

 

I'll have to work with it some more to see how well it can output a quick & dirty video, without any annotations. (Since it wants to animate between key frames, rather than record continuous motion.)