Is there anyone here with experience in screencasting of text-based applications, who could offer advice on how to produce screencasts on windows/xp? The basic screencasting (capture+annotation/editing) is not the problem, eg, CamStudio seems ok, and Wink gives me more control for mostly input-driven sessions (where I want screenshots whenever something useful happens, not long videos of my mousepointer wavering about the screen;-). Both can generate .swf. The problem comes when trying to scale down the size to what would fit in a browser window (what a viewer would see, without having to scroll around) - text becomes hard to read (quality, not size) if I scale from 1280x800 to 640x400, and if I try to work in a screen area that fits 640x400 in the first place (so no scaling would be needed), I can't really show anything.. The intended topic is still haskellmode for Vim, updating the old screenshot tour from http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/~cr3/toolbox/haskell/Vim/vim.html so there'd be a gvim window and a browser window (in real life, also a GHCi window, and quite possibly a cygwin window, but lets keep it simple), and the most interesting info is not in graphics, but in the texts, source code, menus, tooltips, ..., Claus
What is Screencasting? http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/digitalmedia/2005/11/16/what-is-scre...
As a windows user, I tried playing with CamStudio and that almost seems to do the job (capture, annotation, replay, conversion of .avi to compressed .swf) but I don't like the resolution of the .swf it generates (screen text isn't as readable as I've seen in other screencasts). Perhaps I'm missing an option to improve the quality, or can anyone recommend another free tool for windows, from positive experience (wikipedia has a whole list of tools http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_screencasting_software )?
For the purpose I have in mind, it would be good to have many small pieces of screencast, one for each feature, or even better, one continuous screencast with the ability to link directly to sections dealing with particular topics - a hyperlinked animation. Is that supported by some (free) tool?