Video Screen Capture
From TCPwiki
A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture, often containing audio narration. Although the term screencast dates from 2004, products such as Lotus ScreenCam were used as early as 1994. Early products produced large files and had limited editing features. More recent products support more compact file formats such as Macromedia Flash and have more sophisticated editing features allowing changes in sequence, mouse movement, and audio.
Just as a screenshot is a picture of a user's screen, a screencast is essentially a movie of what a user sees on their monitor.
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Uses
Screencasts are useful for demonstrating software features or processes. Creating a screencast helps software developers show off their work. Screencasts are a useful tool for ordinary software users as well, to help report bugs (the movie takes the place of potentially unclear written explanations) or to show others how a given task is accomplished in a specific software environment. Screencasts are excellent tools for learning how to use computers, and several podcasts have started to teach computer users how to use software through screencasts.
Considering the high cost of instructor / faculty led training and the relative ineffectiveness of typical computer based training (CBT) systems, screencasting is likely to become a very popular technique for imparting high-quality knowledge at a low cost.
The strategy of recording seminars is already widely used in fields where using a simple video camera or audio recorder is sufficient to make a useful recording of a seminar. Computer-related seminars need high quality and easily readable recordings of screen contents which is usually not achievable by using a video camera to film the desktop which is usually projected onto the wall by a projector.
Hardware for Screencasting
An alternative solution for capturing a screencast is the use of a hardware RGB or DVI frame grabber card. This approach places the burden of the recording and compression process on a machine separate from the one generating the visual material being captured.
