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Tag: screen

  • Create Videos With Easy Screencast Recorder

    DonationCoder’s NANY (New Apps for the New Year) 2013 is well under way, have a look at a roundup of programs created for the 2013 edition at http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=33518.0 and consider joining the forum for access to discounts and giveaways too. Read below about one of this year’s entries, the Easy Screencast Recorder.

    Easy Screencast Recorder

    Easy Screencast Recorder (Version: 1.07.02) from DonationCoder is a simple yet powerful tool to record short videos. It can record the entire screen or specific regions whether they are pre-defined sizes or specific windows that it automatically discovers – and the user confirms by clicking the right Ctrl key.

    The program comes with a preview window – which can be toggled on and off – to view the captured video. It also comes with a reasonable number of options and preferences that make it both easy and feature rich at the same time. The preferences include the global hotkey setting to start and stop video captures, F9 by default, and a place to see common region sizes and add one’s own if necessary.

    Settings for frame rate, countdown before recording starts, maximum file size before recording is terminated are in the Capture Options. Audio Settings let the user choose the input source and recording format. In my case I was interested in capturing system sounds, a seemingly rarer feature compared to mic, CD or other input sources and ‘Audio Input Line: Stereo Mix’ does that. Video Settings comes with advice for which format to choose and the recommended ASF/WMV9 is accompanied by other choices like FLV, MKV, WebM, Mpeg and others. Most require installed codecs. There are additional options for compression mode and quality which are dependent on the file format chosen. One can also set or change the directory videos are saved in and set a file naming template. The Tweaks and Kludges tab of the options includes additional ‘power user’ options (see image below) and the Operations Log can be set to include debug info in case of problems.

    Easy Screencast Recorder

    After a video is done Easy Screencast Recorder can copy its path to the clipboard, open it in the default video player or perhaps use one of the other tools that one can add in its list of external tools.

    Easy Screencast Recorder integrates automatically into Screenshot Captor. Question about it can be asked at http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=32759.0

  • Greenshot: Open Source And Easy Screen Capture

    Greenshot is a lightweight program to capture parts or all of the screen. When the program is running it will, optionally, take over the Print (or Print Screen) button of the keyboard. It also uses the Ctrl, Alt and Shift keys that when clicked in conjunction with the Print key capture the active window, the whole screen or repeat the last capture respectively. When the Print key is used on its own Greenshot presents the user with a cross hairs to capture, by dragging the mouse, any rectangular region of the screen. In the program’s Preferences one can toggle off the aforementioned hotkeys and therefore use Greenshot by right clicking its tray icon. It is also possible to ask the program to capture the mouse pointer (cursor) or not. There is also a setting called ‘Use interactive window capture mode’ however I did not see anything different when it is toggled on or off.
    There are various ways to control the actions of Greenshot after the capture is done. The Output tab in the preferences lets the user choose

    • to open a capture in the program’s built-in editor,
    • to copy it to the clipboard,
    • to send it to printer,
    • to show the save as dialog box,
    • to save it without any dialog box or
    • to email it

    The same tab has the pre-configurable settings for the ‘save it without any dialog box’ option where one can define the default location for saving, naming rules and image format and quality of the capture.

    The preferences’ Print tab includes such options as fit to page, rotate to fit paper orientation and center image.

    The built-in image editor (see image, captured using Greenshot itself) lets the user draw shapes (rectangle, ellipse, line, arrow, etc.), write text or to crop the captured image. The editor’s Object menu and option, which saves *.gst format files, works as a sort of template or snippet. These *.gst files can hold shapes, arrows or text which can then be overlayed on subsequent screen captures or screen shots.

    Greenshot is fast and is a 550KB download and should work on all Windows versions.