CamStudio

Don't like the sound of your voice? No problem.

CamStudio can also add high-quality, anti-aliased (no jagged edges) screen captions to your recordings in seconds and with the unique Video Annotation feature you can even personalise your videos by including a webcam movie of yourself "picture-in-picture" over your desktop.

And if all that wasn't enough, CamStudio also comes with its own Lossless Codec that produces crystal clear results with a much smaller filesize compared with other more popular codecs, like Microsoft Video 1.

You have total control over the output of your video: you can choose to use custom cursors, to record the whole screen or just a section of it and can reduce or increase the quality of the recording depending on if you want smaller videos (for emailing to people, for instance) or you can have "best quality" ones for burning onto CD/DVD.

But all of these features would be worthless if CamStudio wasn't easy to use ... fortunately that's not the case. CamStudio can be learned in a matter of minutes and comes with a comprehensive built-in helpfile, so if you do manage to get stuck, you can simply hit "Help" and get the answers you need.

So where can I get it and how much does it cost?

You can download and use it completely free - yep - completely 100% free for your personal and commercial projects as CamStudio and the Codec are released under the GPL (for more details on this license, click here.)

There are no royalties or any monies to pay - although if you do use it for a commercial product, I wouldn't say no to a copy of whatever you produce.

CamStudio's History

CamStudio was originally released by a company called RenderSoft who were subsequently bought by a company called eHelp who used some of the technology in their program, RoboDemo ...

Some time later, eHelp was bought by Macromedia who wanted RoboDemo (which was to become Captivate) ...

Knowing that CamStudio did some of the stuff RoboDemo did for free (mainly export to streaming Flash), they released a newer version which fixed some bugs but most importantly, removed certain features. Gone was the ability to create SWFs, added was the requirement to register to use it, and over time, links to the various webpages that had CamStudio and its source code, became broken.

However, I managed to find an earlier version complete with the related CamStudio video codec and the source code for both then put the website up so people could download them.