Wednesday 19 April 2017

Cam Studio Review.



          Caming is one of those interesting, fun and adventurous activities. When it comes to camming there are many camming software out there, but most of them are so costly. However there are some software which are great to use and totally free of charge. And one of them is the Cam StudioSoftware, which is an open source screen casting program for Microsoft.


       The software renders videos in an AVI (Audio Video Interleaved) format, it can also convert these AVIs into flash video format, embedded in SWF (Small Web Format) files. Cam Studio is written in C++.  This is a free streaming video software used on computers e.g. Desktop, screen recorder. This free screen capture program can record any activity on your computer’s monitor, converts audio, video interview or all into streaming videos.
Cam Studio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry standard AVI video files and using its built-in-SWF producer, can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth friendly streaming flash videos
Cam studio software features include:
-          Records your screen and audio to AVI files
-          Converts AVI into flash
-          Highlights your cursor path for clarity
-          Automatically pans
-          Records with sound
-          Lets you add text comments to videos.
Some of the few ways to use the software
-          You can use it to create demonstration videos for any software program
-          You can use it to create tutorial videos, and use it for tutoring live as well.
-          You can create video tutorials for school or college class.
-          You can use it to record a recurring problem with your computer so you can show technical support to people.
-          You can use it to create video-based information products you can sell.
-          You can even use it to record new tricks and techniques you discover on your favorite software program, before you forget them.
-          You can use it to capture on screen videos for training videos.
Also you don’t have to worry about the quality of your voice as the Cam studio software can also add high quality, anti-aliased (no jagged edges) screen captions to your recordings in seconds, and with the unique video annotation feature, you can even also personalize your videos by including a web movie of yourself (picture-in-picture) over your desktop.
Basically you have total control over the output of your video, so you are free to choose to use custom cursors, to record the whole screen or just a section of it and can reduce or increase the quality of the recording depending on if you want smaller videos for emailing to people for instance or you can have best quality ones for burning on to CD/ DVD.
The Software is easy to use and simple to learn as it contains a step by step guide within, also it contains a comprehensive built-in-help file, and just in case you feel stuck you can just hit the help button and get all the answer you need.
Records of Cam Studio
          Cam studiowas originally released as an open source product in October 2001 by a company called render soft who were taken over in 2003 by EHelp Company who used some of the technology in their program, RoboDemo. Later ehelp was bought by macromedia who wanted Rob demo. The source code license was then converted to the GNU (General Public License) in December 2002. Whereby it was a decentralized development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blue prints and documentation freely available to the public. The open-source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is usually used for projects such as in open-source appropriate technologies, and open source drug discovery.
       Open source promotes universal access via an open source or free license to a product’s design or blue print and universal redistribution of that design or blueprint . Before the phrase open source became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of other terms. Open source gained hold with the rise of the internet. The open source software movement a rose to clarify copyright, licensing, domain, and consumer issues.  
     Generally, open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for use and/ or modification from its original design. Open source code is meant to be a collaborative effort, where programmers improve upon the source code and share the changes within the community, so the code will be released under the terms of a software license thus, depending on the license terms, others may then download, modify and publish their version back to the community. Cam studio, ever since its original release in 2001, they have been a gradual improvement of the software by different companies on different releases until to the available latest 2.7.2 (Built r326) which was released on 19/October/2013.
             So like we said, Cam studio is an open source screen casting program for Microsoft window released as free software. Screen casting is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture, often containing audio narration. The term screen cast compares with related term screen shot, screen shot is an image of what is visible on a visual output such as a computer monitor or television. Usually this is a digital image created by the operating system or software running on the device, but it can also be a photograph or a recording made by a device intercepting the video output of the display.


Whereas screenshot generates a single picture of a computer screen, screen cast is essentially a movie of the changes over time that a user sees on a computer screen with audio narration. The cam studiosoftware renders videos in an AVI format. It can also convert these AVIs into Flash video format, embedded in SWF files. Flash video is a container file format used to deliver digital video content (e.g. TV shows, movies, etc) over the internet Using Adobe Flash Player. Flash video content may also be embedded within SWF files. SW
F (Small Web Format) is an adobe flash file format used for multimedia, vector graphics and action script. Originating with future ware software, then transferred to macromedia, and then coming under control of Adobe.SWF files can contain animations or applets of varying degrees of interactivity and function. They can also occur in programs commonly browser games, using action script. There are two different video formats known as flash video.
     If you need more than still images from a screen, especially in cases where you need to show screen actions e.g. showing a tech-support specialist a sequence of actions that results in an error, you can turn to one of these free screen recorders like Cam Studio screen recorder. Cam Studio 2.7.2 free which was released on October 19-2013 which operates on windows system uses AVI format, but you can also convert movies to flash (SWF) files without spending a penny, the software also gives you flexibility, you are free to choose a number of different codec and offers an auto-adjust setting for the frame rate. You can also set it to capture frames every 5 milliseconds up to once per minute, through either entering coordinates or dragging the mouse, you can select a region of the screen on to be captured or just choose to capture the whole screen, cam studio also offers sound recording with inter leave capacity, and an auto-pan feature makes video recording follow the mouse cursor. And the package includes abundant text annotation options.
       Generally Cam studio is a great software to create demos and screen casts on your computer with AVI and you can convert them into flash format the software features include, automatic spanning, and the a ability to record with sound also lets you annotate and append videos with comments. Cam studio also captures screen shots if you set the frame rate, drag the mouse over the area for caption. Much as the software does not have many different file types or audio editor, it is easy to convert AVI files into mp4 and it is a great opportunity to take advantage of especially if you are into production of instructional videos and screen captions. The software is a compact little program with some nice features.
   CamStudio is the most popular streaming video software, which is able to record all screen videos and audio on your computer whereby you are able to create demo videos for anything, make tutorial videos about anything, how about recording for you tube, webinars, you can make your own adventures and exploration with the latest version 2.7.2, why not give it a try by downloading it now as there is nothing to lose and much to gain.
Where to get it from:
The Cam studio software is got by simply downloading it to your computer desktop for your projects. You can download and use it completely free for personal and commercial projects as Cam Studio and the codec are released under General Public License
Costs of the Cam Studio Software:
 The Soft ware is absolutely 100% free with no hidden costs at all. There are also no royalties or any monies to pay unless if you use it for a commercial product that is when you can choose to offer a copy of your product to the owner of Cam Studio
Pros and cons of Cam Studio:
Cam Studio just like any other product has its pros and cons and they can be seen as follows;
Pros:
-          It is free of charge
-          Simple and easy to use
-          You can add high quality screen captions with no jagged edges to your recording in seconds
-          You can record for a longer time than some other soft wares
-          You can choose whether to record audio or not
-          Cam studio lets you create training tutorials and has a nice selection of video styling features.
-          The application is completely free
-          No knowledge required to use this soft ware
-          It has a built in help file
-          At the website there are links which send you to the questions you might have and the provided answers.
In addition to the pros of the software there are positive comments from a wide diversity of people who have downloaded and used the product and have got satisfied by the software results. In most cases when afree product gets such a positive response from the public it confirms its worth to use.
Cons:  
-          It is only available to window users.
-          Only available for desktops not androids
-          There is no movie editing capabilities
-          It can only capture audio from microphone or speakers, not both at the same time
-          It  lacks some features that are available with other same soft wares  
-          The software outputs only to AVI with a conversion of flash
-          It has many limitations in recording videos
-          It is not multi-lingual, only available in English version
In conclusion; quickly record your screen activities, create video tutorials and conclusive presentations using this intuitive and user friendly software. Cam studio is a special tool that will enable you to actually record SWF or AVI video of your computer screen. The program has a simple and easy to use interface, from the tool bar you can start, pause or stop recording, toggle the view ( normal, compact, buttons) the display of screen annotations dialog and recording mode to AVI or SWF .
From the main menu, you can select which region you want to record (manually selected, region, window or full screen) use screen and video annotations as well as adding effects (system time stamp, xnote time stamp, caption, and water mark). In video options you can select the compressor, adjust quality and time lapse. Cursor options will allow you to hide or show the cursor, high light it and enable visual click feed back. The audio options can be set for the microphone, speakers and also for audio and video synchronization.
You can convert AVI to SWF, disable audio recordings, set auto pan speed, assign keyboard shortcuts, as well as set cam studio to stop recording automatically and delete the intermediate AVI file upon completion, to ask you to rename the output video file and play the AVI file once the task is completed. The program uses a low amount of system resources and the audio and video quality of the output files is excellent.
    The Author of the soft ware suggests that he managed to find an earlier version complete with related cam studio video codec and the source code for and put the website up so people could download and use.
ISSUES
A number of people mention having trouble viewing SWF videos generated by cam studio, it turns out there is a bug which means you cannot see anything if you try watching them with Netscape or Firefox, (but internet explorer works fine)
About registration; the version of Cam studio available from this site does not require any registration and has more features built in, so the author suggests uninstalling the version of Cam Studio you have from your system and download and install Cam Studio from here and you are good to go.
And if your computer’s memory or virtual memory usage starts climbing rapidly when viewing a SWF authorized by Cam studio to the point when your computer locks up, so you have to reboot it, recreate the SWF from your source AVI file and in SWF produce, make sure you select the advanced tab and check the memory management tick box (manage Flash player internal memory) that should sort the problem out, as fixed by Ben Ward! As for now Cam Studio 2.7.2 has been installed by people and it works great. 


Get yourself the latest version of Cam Studio absolutely free of charge by simply downloading it from here

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