If you want a free and open-source solution to prepare video of the computer screen captures or the screencasts, CamStudio is the right solution for you. It is absolutely free and is available under GPL open-source license. CamStudio is very lightweight; its download size is only about 1.3 MB. It can video-record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create an AVI video file which is a common video format. Moreover, through its inbuilt SWF Producer software (included in the free package), CamStudio can turn these AVI files into very small sized Streaming Flash videos (SWF) files, or you can even directly record in the SWF files, which can then can be viewed in a browser as Flash objects and can be put on a website.
You can use CamStudio for following purposes:
While recording the high-quality video of your screen activity, CamStudio can record audio from the microphone or system speakers of the computer. You can also add high-quality, anti-aliased (without jagged edges) screen captions to your video recordings. Have a look at just a few screen annotation options available in CamStudio:
It also has the video annotation feature which can be used to personalize your videos by including a webcam movie of yourself as “picture-in-picture” over your desktop.
You can fully customize the video output of CamStudio by:
Its video options allow you to control compression, quality, time lapse, and frame rates.
CamStudio also comes with its own lossless Codec that produces clear results with a much smaller file size.
One of the best features of CamStudio is that it is extremely easy to operate and it has a detailed help documentation which nicely explains its operations. Its interface is very simple and intuitive. You can use the Toogle View button to reduce the size of its small window further. And, this size can still be reduced further once again by clicking on the same button. I have already displayed the full-size main window of CamStudio at the beginning of this article; see the other two different forms of its main window (these are the actual sizes):
Moreover, it can also hide itself to an icon in the system tray so that it does not come in the way of your video recording from the screen. See the image below:
You can directly access the Record, Pause and Stop commands from its icon in the system tray. You can also define the keyboard shortcuts for these operations.
How to record video?
Recording video of your screen activities is very simple. Just click on the Record button on its main window. Or else, click on the Record button from its system tray icon. The Pause button and Stop button are also easily accessible in a similar way to pause or stop the video recording.
CamStudio also gives the option to directly record the video in the SWF form by just clicking the Record to SWF/AVI toggle button. Or else, you can first record the video in AVI format and then convert it into SWF using its inbuilt SWF Producer software which can be invoked from the Tools menu. The SWF Producer has several options to customize the video being saved in the SWF format. Its main window is shown below:
The CamStudio software has several options which can be customized; just see one example:
CamStudio is thus a light-weight video utility to convert your screen activity into video format but it is not light in features. Of course, it is true that you can get commercial software in the same category which may have some more advanced features but then they are quite costly; on the other hand, CamStudio is a free program and yet gives almost all the main features required in such a software. Of course, one main drawback is that it does not support video-editing. But, overall, it is a very useful software.
If you are still not convinced, here is a very informative free YouTube video explaining the features of CamStudio (this video is prepared by YouTube user “jimmyrcom”):
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