Camstudio

CamStudio is one of the best free screencast recorders available, and it just got a little bit better. The developer recently released CamStudio 2.5 Beta 1 and it includes several new features that users are surely going to love. I think my favorite things are being able to select a specific window to record and highlighting the mouse clicks.

CamStudio can record your computer's screen and audio activity and generate AVI video files. Use the built-in SWF Producer to turn the AVI files into lean, mean, friendly-bandwidth SWF files.

CamStudio can also add high-quality, anti-aliased (no jagged edges) screen captions to your recordings in seconds and with the unique 

Video Annotation feature you can even personalise your videos by including a webcam movie of yourself "picture-in-picture" over your desktop.

And if all that wasn't enough, CamStudio also comes with its own Lossless Codec that produces crystal clear results with a much smaller filesize compared with other more popular codecs, like Microsoft Video 1.

You have total control over the output of your video: you can choose to use custom cursors, to record the whole screen or just a section of it and can reduce or increase the quality of the recording depending on if you want smaller videos (for emailing to people, for instance)

Here are just a few ways you can use this software:

• You can use it to create demonstration videos for any software program
• Or how about creating a set of videos answering your most frequently asked questions?
• You can create video tutorials for school or college class
• You can use it to record a recurring problem with your computer so you can show technical support people
• You can use it to create video-based information products you can sell
• You can even use it to record new tricks and techniques you discover on your favourite software program, before you forget them