Sometimes you just want to scratch that itch. For some time, I have been wondering what would it take to write a screen recording application. For Windows. The existing ones were either too primitive, or too expensive.
All the freeware recorders that I could find recorded either with lossy compression, which made the resulting video stream look awful (not to mention they dropped frames like crazy at higher video rates, because MP4 compression is CPU intensive), or with no compression at all, which made the recorded files huge (like 1GB per minute huge).
Then there were the "it's free, but" variety: free, but limited redording length (varying from 15 seconds to 5 minutes), free but with watermark added to the video, or free but only work with the vendor's own video sharing web service. None of these was good enough for my liking.
And last but not least, there are the expensive recorders with all sorts of bells and whistles. Good products, but costly.
I wanted to have something modest and simple (but not primitive), which would be able to capture desktop activity with 100% fidelity, apply a decent compression, so that the recording has sane size and which woudl allow me to perform some basic editing, such as
- trimming the beginning and the end of the recording
- fading in and out
- title and credit screens
- watermarking
- adding background audio
Plus I wanted to be able to compress the result to WMV (remember, we are talking Windows-based recorder here) and upload it to YouTube for the world to see.
The work took me a good while, because the problem turned out to be more difficult than I thought. After I solved the main obstacles of recording the video, all kinds of details to address popped up (there are always problematic details to address, aren't there?).
But eventually the project was finished. You can download the DeskBeam Junior installer from http://www.kalamonsoft.com/dbjr and try it out.
Or take a look at some screenshots to whet your appetite
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| Recorder dialog |
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| Player/editor |
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| Compressor |
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| YouTube uploader |
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