[AncientElite]

i've never used a Screen Capture Program, just because of quality issues.

I would appreciate if someone could tell me what the Best Screen Capture Program is with a User Defined Area to use.

[Stream Recorder]

Screen video capture software need some tricks if you want to record in high quality:

• You need a 2-PASS encoding to get smaller files. But you can't capture from your screen using a 2-pass encoding!
• For the best quality it is recommended to record using HUFFYUV lossless codec first. Huffyuv provides very good quality, but generates a data stream of 10-15 MB/sec.
  
  If your hard drive is not fast enough then you may use a MOTION JPEG codec: Morgan MJPEG, PICVideo MJPEG, MainConcept MJPEG. Motion JPEG codecs generate data stream of 3-8 MB/sec while providing good quality.
• After that you may compress your Huffyuv or Motion JPEG recordings using MPEG-4 AVC codec (like x264) or MPEG-4 ASP codec (like Xvid) and a 2-pass encoding method.
• It is usually a good idea to convert WMV to WMV, RM to RM, .MOV to .MOV, .FLV to .FLV (Windows Media to Windows Media, Real Media to Real Media, Flash video to Flash video) to have less quality loss.
  
  But you can test other codecs as well. For example: free x264 or free xvid.

If super high-quality is not very important, you can try Replay Video Capture. It records from screen using MPEG-2 or Windows Media codec and I'm very satisfied by its quality.

[Stream Recorder]

Camtasia is great, but very overpriced.

Try freeware CamStudio or shareware Replay Video Capture.

Video tutorial: Introduction to Replay Video Capture
Video tutorial: How to manually set the recording window area in Replay Video Capture

[shiva]

do these work with windows 2003 as well ?

[Stream Recorder]

Haven't tried it on windows 2003 server, but I don't see any problem for this to work.

[shiva]

i tried the windows screen capture program on a remote win 2k3 server and the quality was bad ,

[Stream Recorder]

Originally Posted by shiva

i tried the windows screen capture program on a remote win 2k3 server and the quality was bad

It depends on software, its video compression settings and a server load.

[Stream Recorder]

liteCam is one of the screen capture tools that I can recommend. It is cheap, but it is very solid and easy to use. Besides it allows you to schedule your recordings.

[ncnewby]

I went the route of using video screen capture software. I tried a number of trial versions from different vendors and finally settled on WM Capture from Applian. I have only used it once to date, but it captured the Redlasso video very well (high quality, high frame rate) and it did a very good job on the audio as well. The other products I tried lacked video quality and/or did not record internal audio. For some products, when they say they record audio, what they mean is from a mike input.

Downside - to get WM Capture, you have to buy their WM Recorder 12.0 Bonus Pack - for $79.99. I haven't tried WM Recorder or any of the other "bonus" programs. Don't know if they work well or not. But it was worth the price (to me) to get WM Capture.

[Stream Recorder]

WM Capture gives very good quality. I recommend it too.


Video tutorial: How to record video from web-site with WM Capture




Video captured from SurferMag.com with WM Capture (some quality was apparently lost while uploading to youtube)