Re: Freeware alternative to Camtasia for capturing a video of whatever is on the screen

[Bill Wells]

On Sat, 31 Jan 2009 15:32:20 +0900, Johnw wrote:

> Bill Wells brought next idea :
>> On Windows, I've used Camtasia to capture whatever is shown on the screen
>> and whatever comes in on the mic to a video file.
>> I was wondering if there is equivalent freeware that captures the screen
>> and microphone to a video file.
>> Googling, I found "wink", http://www.debugmode.com/wink/download.php which
>> I will test out.
>> Meanwhile, do you know of other prospective freeware to capture a WinXP
>> screen and microphone input to a video file (any format is OK).
>
> Maybe one of these.
> Jing
> http://www.jingproject.com/
>
> Free Screen Recorder
> http://www.nbxsoft.com/screen-recorder.php
>
> Freez Screen Video Capture
> http://www.smallvideosoft.com/screen-video-capture/
>
> CamStudio
> http://www.camstudio.org/

Nice. Very nice. I didn't realize there were so many good ones out there.
I'm going to try out, in this order (based on their descriptions)
1. CamStudio -> captures screen and audio to AVI & SWF
2. Free Screen Recorder -> captures screen and audio to AVI
3. Wink -> captures screen and audio to SWF and exe on the local disk

These two suffer from use model or registration issues & won't be tested:
4. Jing -> captures screen and audio to SWF for instant sharing online
5. Freez -> captures screen and audio to AVI (requires registration)

One application this allows me is I can play music in the background, and
then scroll through my picture collection of a school event, and the whole
thing is automatically turned into a video that I can share or convert to
DVD for sharing. That's a neat idea.

[Johnw]

Bill Wells formulated on Sunday :

> Nice. Very nice. I didn't realize there were so many good ones out there.
> I'm going to try out, in this order (based on their descriptions)
> 1. CamStudio -> captures screen and audio to AVI & SWF
> 2. Free Screen Recorder -> captures screen and audio to AVI
> 3. Wink -> captures screen and audio to SWF and exe on the local disk
> These two suffer from use model or registration issues & won't be tested:
> 4. Jing -> captures screen and audio to SWF for instant sharing online
> 5. Freez -> captures screen and audio to AVI (requires registration)
> One application this allows me is I can play music in the background, and
> then scroll through my picture collection of a school event, and the whole
> thing is automatically turned into a video that I can share or convert to
> DVD for sharing. That's a neat idea.

Sounds like you will be busy for a while, have fun.

[Bill Wells]

On Sun, 01 Feb 2009 08:41:00 +0900, Johnw wrote:

>> One application this allows me is I can play music in the background, and
>> then scroll through my picture collection of a school event, and the whole
>> thing is automatically turned into a video that I can share or convert to
>> DVD for sharing. That's a neat idea.
>
> Sounds like you will be busy for a while, have fun.

Your recommended CamStudio seems fine for what I need.
It's much simpler to use than Wink, for example.

I just checked the option to record audio and then hit the record button.
When done, I hit the stop button and it automatically saves to an AVI.
I kind'a wish it would save to an AVI as it was recording so I wonder when
it will run out of memory, but that will take time to ascertain.

Once it's an AVI file, I can edit to my heart's content (not) and then
convert to DVD-video format with DVDFlick freeware and burn to DVD media
with ImgBurn freeware.

Thanks for the great suggestion. I'll try to summarize separately for
others to gain knowledge from our endeavor.