CamStudio Records OnScreen Activity
To my surprise, this program wants to continue its existence among us. You see, many many years ago i remember downloading and using Camstudio to create video tutorials. It is because of this, that I am glad an individual by the name of ‘Nick the Geek’ has created a site to download, update and give information about this excellent piece of software.
In a few sentences, Camstudio is open source software and it allows you to record on-screen activity to a video file. You have the options to save an AVI or an SWF file, with voice or with text on screen too. The user is able to specify the width and height of the capture area, how many frames per second to record or even the type of cursor to be used.
Best of all, there is a codec called CSCD (Camstudio Lossless codec), and with this little piece of software, the user is able to record large areas of on-screen activity at high resolution, while keeping the filesize of the resulting file very small.
Just to give you a background on this program, Camstudio was originally created and released as open source by a company called RenderSoft, and this company was bought by a corporation called eHelp (the creators of RoboDemo). Later, Macromedia bought eHelp and RoboDemo to further modify the software into what they called ‘Captivate’. At this time they also released a ‘new’ version of Camstudio: 2.1, and altough a few bugs were fixed, this version lacked the ability to export to SWF and also required registration.. not to mention that the filesize of version 2.1 was over 9 megabytes, while the original camstudio version 2.0 was only 1.3 megabytes.
According to Nick the Geek, here is what you can do with CamStudio
- 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
Download Camstudio and the Lossless codec: http://camstudio.org
