What's your favorite video screen recorder software?

I'd like to record video of my computer (preferably just part of my desktop) but I'm not sure what's the best free way to do this. Can anyone here recommend something?

@blowdart:It's free for a month, definitely the pick of the bunch

Camtasia is great, but really, really expensive.

I use BSR screen recorder. Its only 50 usd and it works really well. I like how it draws a yellow circle around the mouse cursor making it very easy to see what the presenter is doing with the mouse.

I press Alt+Prt Sc really, really fast.

Expression Encoder is free and works well.

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=24601

@cbae:LOL ... And then combine all of them into an animated gif i asume

16 seconds ago,webmonkey wrote

Expression Encoder is free and works well.

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=24601

Hey, what do you know? I have that installed already, and I didn't even know it.

I find that a lot of the free ones work well enough for recording traditional desktop demo stuff, but with more complicated things the framerate isn't up to it.

I like Expression Encoder for quick and easy stuff. It's less fiddly than Camtasia.

Oh, it's the new version of Windows Media Encoder.

1 hour ago,webmonkey wrote

Expression Encoder is free and works well.

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=24601

@dentaku:I ended up getting the full version because it supports smooth streaming.

It's actually a well made program but I can see that for what I want to do it'll slow down my computer too much. I want to use Expression Encoder, the Kinect Cursor software, some MIDI control software AND some big audio software that eats up resources and NEEDS to have decent latency all at the same time so I'm guessing it'll make the Kinect software unbearably laggy

I might try Camstudio because it's also free.

1 hour ago,kettch wrote

@dentaku:I ended up getting the full version because it supports smooth streaming.

@webmonkey:+1 for Expression Encoder 3 - also edit with Windows Live Movie Maker (also free)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPCdYWlHq98 was done with these 2 (but don't let that put you off)

Jing - http://www.techsmith.com/jing/ and www.screencast.com, TechSmith, same company that creates the paid for Camtasia, video's are limited to 5mins, but ok for most tasks.

I like Live Movie Maker but I've done some more testing and Expression Encoder 4 just takes too much resources for what I want to do.

I ended up finding a nice new Kinect MIDI controller which simplified the process (It's way better than using the Kinect Mouse Cursor Control like I was origially was doing) and I tested out the free Camstudio and it doesn't slow down stuff nearly as much.

Here's one off my first attempts at making a Kinect Theremin using ashwnacharya's Kinect MIDI Controller, Live Professor and Super Spook Keys, which are all all free tools.

http://www.box.net/shared/5gqcyazndels79e7fi27

5 hours ago,Ian2 wrote

@webmonkey:+1 for Expression Encoder 3 - also edit with Windows Live Movie Maker (also free)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPCdYWlHq98 was done with these 2 (but don't let that put you off)

I've found that Expression Encoder is just about the only application that is really capable of recording a DWM desktop with decent framerate.

Personally I use SolveigMM Hypercam 3 for most of my recording work; it's not free but a heck of a lot cheaper than Camtasia. The free CamStudio might also work for you (the main reason I used Hypercam is because I found CamStudio can't properly capture the cursor of a virtual machine in VMWare/VirtualPC).

If you use either HyperCam or CamStudio, you've just gotta be aware of a couple of caveats. First, disable the DWM when you record, it vastly increases the framerate. Second, if you want to record your computer's sound you must have a "Stereo Mix" or similar input on your sound card. Third, I strongly recommend recording using a light-weight lossless codec: this reduces CPU usage during recording and improves the quality because you won't re-compress using a lossy codec during editing. I recommend either HuffYUV or Lagarith; the latter is slightly more CPU intensive but supports more colour spaces. Finally, HyperCam sometimes gets the audio out of sync; it's because of VFW delay frames and it's really easy to fix, if you end up having this problem let me know.

Finally, Fraps can record a DWM desktop but the framerate is pretty bad (it can't record a non-DWM desktop, it's for 3D apps only). On the plus side, it can capture audio on Vista/Win7 without needing a "Stereo Mix" input.