capture (parts of) the screen

[david02]

Hi,

anybody knows a good program to capture part of the screen and audio ?

I think the resulting avi file will be large so my second question is:

Does anybody know a good program to shrink avi files?

greetings

David

[lightshow]

I had a screen capture software that recorded whatever area you specify (in a rectangle) and it also recorded audio, but I've since uninstalled it and can't remember the name of it.

Soooo, at least you know there is one out there somewhere.

[david02]

thx for replying.

I found a capture program but the size of the resulting video is very large. I am only recording a chessboard when people are playing so not much is happening. Is there a way to make it smaller with the same quality?

[chip19]

Look into the DivX or XVid codecs. You undoubtedly have seen the perfect quality video that results from it with small sizes (700MB for two hours). Beyond that, you could probably make the bitrate go WAY down if you just have a chess board that moves every once in a while. If it is a 2D non-fancy board especially, you could use a very low setting and it would still get the point across.

The easiest way I think to re-encode video is using VirtualDubMod. After you open your video in that, you can go to File->Save As. Change the mode to Fast Recompress, and then select DivX or XVid as your codec (you have to install these prior). A general walkthrough of how to do that can be found here (http://www.ryan.com.br/virtualdub_en.htm).

You may also want to look into Avi Recomp (http://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=820)... it is a frontend for Xvid and virtualDubMod that should make your life easier.

Good luck ..

[invivo]

Try Techsmith's Camtasia Studio or Snagit. I believe one of the has an option to convert to Flash video files so the resulting video would be fairly small.

[Barbarossa]

Try Screen Recorder by ZDSoft

[david02]

thx a lot everybody for the tips. great programs!

I want to thank especially invivo! Those flash movies are indeed very, very small. Just what I needed.