JISC Digital Media Blog

Free, open source screen capture program

Posted by Steve Hull on Wednesday 15 October 2008 at 1:35pm
Tags: e-learning | open source | screen capture | teaching

There’s a nice little open source screen capture program available on the web for Windows users.  CamStudio will record whatever happens on all or part of your screen, but there are a few nice extras as well.

Images are captured into an AVI file, but if you wish it will simultaneously produce an SWF version. You can record and play back the recording at different rates; you could, for example, play something back at 5 times the speed you recorded it at and impress the viewers with your speedy typing.

Various screen annotations can be created before or during the recording in a variety of shapes and sizes.  You can choose to have CamStudio record a different cursor shape from the one you are using or even get it to add a highlight behind the cursor to make it more visible.  Best of all, there’s an ‘autopan’ feature which causes CamStudio to follow the cursor around on the screen.

There are a number of audio and video options which I haven’t been able to test out, including some facility for video annotation.  That said, there are lots of interesting and useful features and a pleasantly simple interface.  It would be worthwhile as a purchase: as a free download it’s tremendous.