Open Source Video Capture from a Win32 Window?

Phleg asks; "A professor of mine has been using TechSmith's Camtasia Studio software in order to take movies of what's going on on his screen. However, it's buggy, expensive, and a hassle. I've looked around the web for something that's GPL'd that can accomplish the same thing, and come up with nothing useful. The final stipulation is that it has to work under Windows, as much of the software he uses (Scientific Workplace, for one) is Windows-only. Has anyone found a (free) way to capture what's displayed on screen into a video, as well as grabbing inputs from a mic? Any codec would be fine." Those interested in a similar solution for Linux might be interested in this discussion.

Comments

Re:SnagIt

[arglesnaf]

Ermm, the Video version of snagit is canastia studio. exactly what he said he did not want to use. You go to the techsmith website and canastia studio ads take up half the screen.

Re:Ask Slashdot

[ameoba]

Considering that the article uses Scientific Workplace as an example of the software that's going to be run, this is highly unlikely.

To some extent, I mirror the feelings of the 'troll'. I've been noticing a lot of people comming into the open source looking for free beer and if they can't find it, expecting others to buy them a beer. They feel that they are entitled to have the community serve them.

What's even worse are those people that hear about this 'free software' thing, and want drop in replacements for expensive proprietary software that interfaces into the lowest levels of windows. There's reasons people don't write free versions of this stuff.

Most of the problems that are solved by going into the plumbing of windows (the win32 API is ugly, awkward, and when you get to the lower levels, very poorly documented) are either non-issues under Linux (such as the firewall post the other day) or have trivial solutions under Linux.