Software for recording a section of the screen?

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Weaksauce
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Jun 8, 2009
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I want to record a specified section of the screen so I can capture video+audio from a game in a flash applet on a website. I tried Camtasia but it always seems to record at a low quality and it crashes when I try to adjust it. Fraps also didn't work because I think it only works for fullscreen games and you can't manually specify an area to capture. Does anyone know any good free or paid software that can do this?
 
Windows Media Encoder has an option to capture a given window or even a specific section of screen (defined by standard X-Y coordinates, etc). Been using it for years to do that sort of stuff, and it's free.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles/screencap.aspx

Those are the basic instructions, specific to WME version 9, so you'll need to make sure you get the actual WMEncoder and not the newer software called Expression which only allows for 10 minute recordings of screen captures. Microsoft has altered most every link leading to version 9 on their own site, effectively hiding it since they'd prefer you use Expression nowadays (WME is no longer supported but it still gets the job done just fine). You can get WME 9 from here:

http://www.free-codecs.com/Windows_Media_Encoder_9_Series_download.htm

It's safe, I just grabbed a spare copy of it, submitted it to VirusTotal.com (you can look at the scan results here and it's clean, then installed it on Windows 7 Professional x86 and it's working just fine.

I'm testing this with a recording even as I'm typing this sentence, actually. :D
 
While Fraps can can't do desktop regions (has to do the whole desktop), it's very easy to crop the areas you don't want.
 
Camtasia is by far the best, but it's commercial. (You must have it configured wrong if you are getting bad results).

CamStudio is a free option and it is decent; but no where as good as Camtasia. Check it out.
 
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I can't remember what it's called but I had something like this once. You drew a green box on the screen and pressed record. It even converted it into .gif images for you :cool:
 
IronMan77 said:
CamStudio is a free option and it is decent; but no where as good as Camtasia. Check it out.
Click to expand...

I haven't been able to Camstudio to capture audio on anything after XP, so YMMV. Pretty sure it depends on the mobo.
 
I tried all of the recommended programs and none of them seemed to work.

WM Capture - said my sound card doesn't support "what u hear" recording. X-Fi Fatality, works with Camtasia and Audacity so not sure why WM Capture won't detect it.

Windows Media Encoder - wouldn't record audio either. Even with video quality settings maxed out, the quality was horrible.

Camstudio - video quality was good but every now and then it would lag for a second.

Hypercam - audio out of sync, and lags every now and then.

Camtasia - is the best I've tried but I can't figure out how to adjust the video quality. The only option I see is "manual configuration > video compression" but the "video compression" button just crashes it. Is there another settings menu somewhere?
 
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