Free Video Capture Software

Cole had requested I do a video capture to save the contents of a Webinar for repeated viewing without killing our bandwidth limits. I accomplished this with the following free tools with just a little bit of tweaking:

CamStudio, http://camstudio.org/ for video/audio capture:

Needed some tweaking to get it to work, but hey, it was free:

1. Had to enable couple of Recording devices from the Sound setup, which wasn’t easy to locate: double click sound icon in systray, Options -> Properties, select radio button Recording, checked Mono Out, click OK, now see the recording control, select Mono Out as the default device. However this may be different for different machines.

2. Video was capturing most desktop stuff, just not the actual video in windows media player. Turns out I had to disable hardware acceleration: right-click desktop, properties, click Settings tab, click Advanced Button, click Troubleshoot tab, move Hardware Acceleration slider all the way to the left to None.

3. When you stop the recording, if you captured a long segment, like 30 minutes or more, then it looks like it locks up. Best to just walk away and come back 5 minutes later, and it usually manages to successfully save your file.

CamStudio captures in AVI, which is kind of bloated, so I looked for a tool to convert the AVI's to MPG. For this I found:

Any Video Converter, http://www.any-video-converter.com/ to convert AVI to MPG

This one was very straightforward to install and use, but is very CPU intensive like any video converter is.