Capturing PC Screen and mouse movements?

[RTailor]

I have been looking around the web but i still can't find out how to capture my PC screen movements like what i click on with my mouse and what i open etc, i want to create a dvd with instructions on how to do things on a PC but how do i capture the screen into video? Does anybody have a guide for this or know how to do this?

[non-linear]

You could do this with two computers; one for capturing the video and one for doing the demonstrations and such. The computer you're doing the tutorial on would need TV out capability on the video card (like the ATI All-In-Wonder cards) and you would need the capture system to have a capture card to feed the video from the other computer into (either using RCA or S-Video inputs; whatever the other computer uses).

Another low-tech way if you have a TV-out on your capture system would be to send the video to a VCR and record the demonstrations, then feed the video back in for editing and DVD authoring. Definitelly the cheapest way, but like I said, a low-tech way.

Those are the only two methods I can think of.

[Bondiablo]

snagit

http://www.techsmith.com/

there was also a program on one of the microsoft office discs that would do it but the file sizes where huge, think it only captured in uncompressed AVI or something. i dont remember what it was called or if it was office 2000 or 97 though and it wasn't installed with a regual install you had to look for it in the extras.

[NYPlayer]

Camtasia will do exactly what you want.


http://www.techsmith.com/products/studio/default.asp

[ImaWeTodd]

I have been looking around the web ...

Did you try the tools section of dvdrhelp?

https://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=296#comments

Maybe that does what you want. It is free ...

CamStudio is the ideal tool for you to quickly create AVI based software demos

[Alan69]

CamStudio is the program you want. Open source free program, and configure the compressor as DIVX 5.0x with a width and height that are multiples of 4, and it works great with reasonable file sizes. Of course will use other compressors if you want another format for easier DVD making. Captures online cams from your screen to a treat, will of course capture anything on your screen. Bulent's Screen Recorder is another free option, but I could never get it to actually work with DIVX as the compressor. Didn't try too hard, found CamStudio instead.

Also find 'Mouse and Key Recorder' to automate web grabbing tasks while you're looking around.

Alan

[djmattyb]

Or try Wink. I love this screen capture utility because it create Macromedia Flash files of your screen captures. If you are looking to just capture basic mouse movements and show screens and not capture video, then use this, it's free. It is the best solution of all the suggestions I have seen here.

http://www.debugmode.com/wink/

If you want to see what this program can do, the people at DVD Shrink have used it to create their online guides.

http://www.dvdshrink.info/guides.php

I highly recommend this program!

[xtreemkareem]

Camtasia is good, and I use it to screen capture swfs. Only prob is that it captures at a low frame rate, and adjusting it doesn't help much, even after disabling hardware acceleration - and you cand capture direct-draw enabled games when disabling hardware acceleration. Anyone got tips to capture at decent frame rate using Camtasia (also to capture .mov that won't allow audio encoding).

[RTailor]

Thanks for all the input, i have decided to go for CamStudio it's exactly what i was looking for.