A friend of mine doing a presentation on gaming and children asked me whether i could make a short 30 sec movie of 3 rather violent children games. I agreed, as you learn with everything you do ;-). So i started a search for programs that can capture what you see on your screen as well as capture the sound that's playing.
I found out there are quite some programs stating they can capture your screen. Some allow you to add a voice. But there seem few programs that capture both video and audio of the game.
I eventually came to appreciate the free CamStudio. It didn't work trouble free, but it was the tool that worked the best for me.
Since the output of CamStudio wasn't working on all machines i tried it on (a codec thingy i guess), i tried to convert the clips with Super. The 1st clip worked, but the rest seemed to loop forever (Super doesn't show you progress, it shows a progress bar, but that keeps looping until it's done ... i even gave Super a whole night, but even then it was still going). I therefor continued my quest and found MediaCoder, which didn't do it all, but was a worthwhile find.
Eventually I found sometimes VLC played the output, and sometimes (also) Quicktime. So no need to convert.
But in the end, i concluded i should have bought Camtasia: this tool turned out to be the easiest for this task! I heard Mac users should try Screenflow for OSX.
And while doing this I also found this info about downloading YouTube-clips and converting it to wmv with WinFF. WinFF didn't work for me, as it gave me an error about access to the temp folder upon installing. xviservicethief looks like a great tool as well: next time i might try that as well.
Anyway: this basically simple looking question cost me about 8 hours. My laptop graphics card died after the 1st clip, so i couldn't use my laptop anymore, and my PC crashed on my attempt to do the work on that machine, when i was trying all sorts of conversion and capture tools. It has lost all sound...
Update Nov 2010: read about free open source video capture software 'xvideoservicethief'.
Hi, I read your story about capturing a bit late, like an elderly civil servant from Ede;-) but I can add good experiences with Hypercam, both sound and vision. Not perfect in video-quality but quite easy to use.
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