I am here to introduce to you yet another Open Source Software. This time, it’s for recording your screen movements. It’s called CamStudio. This powerful software is mainly used for program demonstration or for tutorials. Basically what it does it to record what you do on your screen into a video file. And it’s supports audio input as well. So you can give an audio presentation along with your video. What better way to present something with both audio and video right? You get to show your viewers where to click, where the key in stuff or where to find certain information. And now, you can convert those video files to flash files (SWF). This comes very handy for website developers, especially now since broadband is becoming more and more commonplace and bandwidth is less a problem. We see a lot of websites which incorporates streaming videos.

However, I mostly use this software to create little tutorials for my company. I usually create simple tutorials like how to create email signatures in MS Outlook, how to add contacts and so on on my company’s Intranet. The users just access it on the Intranet with their browser since I have converted them to flash. Nothing is easier and it saves me a lot of time and effort. I don’t need to go around explaining to my company users how to do those simple stuff. And video is a whole lot easier than a written tutorial. I also use it for creating presentation videos to explain my company’s IT policies.

CamStudio has it’s own audio codec which is supposed to be of a higher quality. However, I would not recomend using it since the other party who is going to watch the video may not have the codec installed and the audio will not work.Or you can easily add captions to your video files if you are worried about the audio problem. CamStudio comes with high quality, anti-aliased screen captions to add to your videos. If done properly, your video will look professional.

If you are going to use this software, get the latest Beta version (2.5). The older version has a problem with creating SWF files which may result in the flash file not displayed on certain browsers. CamStudio is for Windows only and is free( It’s open source, of course it is free). You can also read up on the development of the software through their blog. Oh, please support the software by donating something if you can.