http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_screencasting_softwareI'm going to be going over this list and trying a few of these out. Any suggestions are appreciated and I'd like to hear of any experiences if you have them. It'll have to be for Windows 32-bit XP, and need to be free to download (even if it's shareware or similar -demos, for example).
Update: Preliminary tests complete, results below.
Microsoft Expression (free download version):
Pros: High quality captures, exports to a web-ready format (Silverlight), easy to use.
Cons: Couldn't get sound to work on 2 tries, Blender's displays fall to black when not being actively utilized, requires Microsoft Silverlight, 10 minute max recording time for free edition.
I'm going with this one for the time being StudioCam (free and open source):
Pros: Captures Blender well, has a setting to follow the cursor for a smaller window size, sound works well
Cons: large file sizes maybe, but should be convertable to flash video if that will help, the codec utilized initially had some strange artifacting in blender (possibly due to quality settings)
CaptureFox (free firefox extension):
Pros: Captures full screen well, including blender, sound works well
Cons: Requires firefox to be running, requires file conversion afterward as well
Note the above information may be incorrect and I don't warrant it as 100% accurate. Still trying everything out...
Update: Yes, I belive I accidentally muted the mic during the MS Expression tests, however that still doesn't influence the fact that it doesn't capture the blender screens with any reliability. Contrary to what Omega just said (sup!) I haven't had any issues with dropped frames during full-screen capture using CamStudio. I think that will be what I go with probably. The CaptureFox extension just crashed a moment ago when I tried to up the quality and framerate and encode to mp3. Throw in the features that CamStudio has, it's much better. CaptureFox has it's uses, but not this one. When I have a web-ready sample I'll throw it up and get some opinions.
Omega: You might have been dropping frames due to processing power overload. It can take a lot of cycles just to encode video while doing other, CPU-intensive things. I don't know if that was your case but it's the first thing that comes to my mind.
Update: CamStudio, Gimp, and Microsoft Movie Maker test - uploaded to YouTube. See below. Quality leaves something to be desired.
On a second glance, it's not 100% but it's much better in the High-Quality format. It should be acceptable for tutorials, particularly when it's considered that I will have narration and annotation available. It's time to produce something...
