I want to make some short blogging tutorials video and am looking for a desktop recorder or screen recording software for this purpose. Some people used and highly recommended Camtasia Studio, however the software price is killing me ($299). If you want you can actually try it for 30 days before deciding to purchase it but for me I will give the free recording software a try first and see how good they are.

I found some useful links after doing Google search and here they are:

Capture Fox

Capture Fox is a Firefox add-on and a handy tool to create tutorials about a software, a web site or anything that can be displayed on your computer. It records your screen frame by frame. You can also record your voice. Please note that this Firefox extension is for Windows XP and Vista only.

CamStudio

CamStudio is an open source alternative to Camstasia.
It does not bring all the features of the paid software, but it should get the job done, so give it a try. CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs).

Jing

Jing is a free recording software from TechSmith, the Camtasia Studio software developer. Besides the free version of Jing and Camtasia Studio TechSmith also offers Jing Pro and Snagit but if you are looking for a freeware you can go with Jing only, however you can have the trial version of Camtasia Studio and Snagit if you want to.

I have tried the CamStudio and am happy with the result. I plan to record the narration separately with Audacity and then combine the audio and video using VirtualDub. CamStudio allows you to record the audio real time but some guys said the audio is better if you record it separately.
If you have tried one of the free recording software above I would be happy to hear your comments.

- Rudi

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