The free online screen recorder by Apowersoft is a pretty handy tool that allows you to record your screen without installing any software. You will need to have Java installed on your PC though. Just visit their website and click the Start Recording button to initiate the Java applet for onscreen recording. Just wait a few seconds for the Java application to start.

The tool offers various options to make your task easier. You can either record a certain portion of your screen or record the whole thing. You can also change the settings for audio input to feed the audio from your microphone, system sound or both.

A good feature of Apowersoft’s Online Screen Recorder is that it also comes with some handy keyboard shortcuts. Click on the Options button to see the list of Keyboard shortcuts that can be used to control the screen recording process. There are shortcuts available for Starting, pausing, stopping, drawing rectangle, drawing ellipse etc. Clicking on the Recording tab will bring up another set of options that lets you set the frame rate, bit rate etc.

Once you start the recording process, you will see a small toolbar above your recording area. It has the buttons for Play/Pause and a set of other drawing tools. These allow you to draw rectangles, ellipses, and draw strokes using the brush. You can also pick colors using the color picker. If you want, you can add your webcam footage to the screencast as well. This will be especially handy if you are creating some sort of a video tutorial.

Apowersoft’s online screen recorder is a quite powerful and lightweight tool that is suitable for recording screencasts with ease.

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You will need a couple of softwares to do this. Don’t worry you won’t have to spend hours downloading them for these are very small softwares. To record on-screen videos, what you’ll need first is CamStudio, a software which lets you record the activities going on on the whole screen, or just an area. Download the software and install it.

Launch the software and do as follows:

Select Region from “Region” menu. This will let you select an arbitrary area on the screen to record video for. Or you can choose the option “Full Screen” to record the whole screen.

Press F8 and then select a desired area by dragging.

You will see a highlight in the four corners of the area being recorded. Carry on your actions as you’d do regularly in the area.

When you finish press F9 to stop recording.

Finally save the file as AVI.

Now you have a video in the AVI format. But embedding AVI files in websites isn’t possible. To convert it to GIF, you’ll need another software 123 AVI to GIF converter. Download and install this software as well. Then,

Open up your AVI file. Select the options Windows 256 from Color Reduction Dropdown and select Nearest for Dither mode.

Click on Covert. This will convert your AVI to GIF.

Then save the GIF file.

The size of the GIF file is very large nearly the size of the AVI file. So you need to optimize the size for embedding it in your website. To do this download another software called Trout’s GIF Optimizer. Open up the GIF file and then Save it. You’ll be amazed at the reduction in file size.

Now you have the screencast’s GIF file ready for embedding in your website or blog. You can see a sample of on-screen video in GIF format in this post on Google Spreadsheets.

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Actually there are a number of softwares available for recording on-screen activities. But if you don’t want to spend a penny and still want to have some fun capturing screen videos, CamStudio can be your friend. CamStudio is a free and open source software that lets you record on-screen videos.

The download is very small, of about 1.3 MB. The interface looks very simple but the performance is really amazing. It provides a lot of options. You can choose to capture the activities going on, on the whole screen, a fixed portion on the screen setting the parameters prior to recording, or any arbitrary rectangular area.

You can also edit the video options from Options>Video Options . You can adjust the Video Compressor, Frame Rate and Quality of the video. The output of the on-screen video can also be obtained in SWF format. If you want to highlight the cursor in your video or change the cursor icon, you can do it from Cursor Options.

Besides just captuing videos, you can also add audio from Microphone or Speakers. You have a number of options for manipulating Recording Format, Compressing Format etc. If you feel the delay in video and its corresponding audio, you can set a time shift in milliseconds to perfectly sync the audio and video.

One cool thing about CamStudio is the Video and Screen Annotations feature. Besides just recording on-screen activities, you can also add floating rectangular or elliptical areas in beautiful colors hanging around the video and add annotations to them. You can select one from a number of ready-made ones and edit them on the go. These are useful for adding comments or any additional notes in the video. The video annotations feature is available only if you have a webcam.

So CamStudio is overall a great software for recording screen activities. And most of that, it comes for free. So just download CamStudio and begin recording your very own On-Screen Videos like the pros.

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