There are plenty of free tools out that let you make videos of the activity on your desktop. Wink and CamStudio are two excellent tools, but Wink records your screencast as a flash file, while CamStudio doesn't let you record audio and video at the same time when using Vista (yet).

Screencast-O-Matic is a new web-based screencast program that is incredibly easy to use. And since it uses a Java applet, it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux machines. Here's a little screencast we put together showing the new Street View in Google Maps.





You may notice two things right off the bat. The audio sounds like it's recorded through a telephone. It's not, but Screencast-O-Matic seems to emphasize video over audio, and the resulting sound is a bit subpar.

Second, we uploaded this video to YouTube in order to share it. Although Screencast-O-Matic lets you upload your videos directly to their site as soon as you've finished recording, there doesn't appear to be any way to embed those videos in a blog. Fortunately, you can also export videos as a Quicktime videos, which you can then upload to YouTube or other sites.

We would have made a screencast showing how to set up a screencast, but that probably would have crashed our test PC. While you could take us at our word that Screencast-O-Matic is super easy to use, we've created a photo gallery to walk you through the process.

[via TechCrunch]

CamStudio is a nifty little tool for capturing video on your PC. It is hosted at SourceForge.net, is open source, and free for the downloading. This tool allows capturing the full screen, a region, or a fixed region (which is a region you set explicitly). CamStudio offers many features that are rare among the freeware video apps out there, including screen and video annotations, the ability to use a bunch of different compressions, record/not record audio, allows custom cursor options, and even ships with a AVI to flash converter for your video pleasure. There are several decent screen recorders out there, but none I have seen that offer superior quality for free, that even runs quite well on older hardware. CamStudio is lightweight, quick and dirty, yet has many robust features that will greatly enhance the quality of your video arsenal. If you want to see a good example of what you can do with CamStudio, I used it to make the videos on the Word 2007 Video Review post this morning.