Best free screen capture software ?

[stevesideas]

I was thinking of Camtasia but it's fairly expensive so was wondering if anyone else had had experience with an alternative free or cheaper program.

[glorybound]

Jing, which is their free version. That's what I use, but it's probably not for any heavy lifting.

[joconnell]

Camstudio is open source and free too.

[glorybound]

I was thinking Camtasia Studio

Camstudio is open source and free too.

okay, I was correct. X this one!

[stevesideas]

I actually download Camstudio. Its pretty good. I wonder if there is one out there that does webcam capture at the same time ?

One other thing. I tried downloading the camtasia trial but it wouldn't run on windows 7 even though it says it should...has anyone else tried it or could they possibly to see if it might just be me ?

[Morne]

Microsoft Expressions Free Edition is pretty good. (It's the new Microsoft Media Encoder)
It doesnt output H.264, but for screen capture you can tweak things with the free version to get a small file which is almost lossles. You can always then afterwards convert it to H.264 with something else

[JohnVK]

I have been using FastStone ever since I discovered it. It's very simple in its recording settings (only records to .wmv) but nonetheless extremely handy when it comes to the capturing possibilities. It also grabs images (even free hand selections) and let you draw on them afterwards.

It has a nice small toolbar on screen (if you want) and it also pretty much doesn't use up any unnecessary resources (around 560K memory). Continued development (since 2006) and support and only $19.95 for a lifetime license.

And like Morne said, you can always take your recordings into another program and convert to other file formats there.

http://www.faststone.org/FSCaptureDetail.htm

[stevesideas]

Thanks for the tips.

[JohnVK]

One other thing. I tried downloading the camtasia trial but it wouldn't run on windows 7 even though it says it should...has anyone else tried it or could they possibly to see if it might just be me ?

We have Camtasia running on windows 7 at the office. No problem at all to be honest.

[stevesideas]

Strange. I downloaded the demo and tried to install but it just comes up with an error saying "this is not a valid win32 application". I tried running as admin but it still didn't like it. Maybe I'll check again.

[JohnVK]

Yeah, that is strange?

Usually when I get that type of error is when the download/file(s) was (partially) corrupt but still managed to install. Indeed, maybe download anew and try again? It really should work without problems

[Da_elf]

funny enough i like hypercam2... opps you said free

[glorybound]

I just ran across this:
http://www.telestream.net/screen-flow/