CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create AVI video files from this. Using its built-in SWF Producer, the program can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs).

CamStudio can also add high-quality, anti-aliased screen captions to your recordings, and thanks to its Video Annotation feature you can even personalize your videos by including a webcam movie of yourself "picture-in-picture" over your desktop.

Possible uses for the program:

• Create demonstration videos for any software program

• Produce a set of videos answering your most frequently asked questions

• Make video tutorials for school or college class

• Use it to record a recurring problem with your computer so you can show technical support people

• Create video-based information products you can sell

• Record new tricks and techniques you discover on your favorite software program, before you forget them

Download CamStudio 2.0 in Softonic

Webcams are useful to have video chats with friends across thousands of miles – or maybe just a couple of blocks away – but they can also be used for other purposes.

One of them is capturing video right to your computer, something you can easily do with AMCap. This simple tool grabs the video signal coming from your webcam and records it straight away to your hard drive, in MPEG2 or AVI format, provided you have the necessary codecs. It features some other interesting options, such as the possibility to take screenshots or adding special effects to the image (graphic overlay, alpha-blending, transparency, etc.).

That said, I must confess I found AMCap a bit deceiving. Maybe I expected something else: a webcam monitoring tool or something similar. But I honestly don't find this program that useful. It doesn't even let you take screenshots automatically according to a certain lapse of time. Also, video files take a lot of room, so you better have a large hard drive ready for them.

AMCap is a simple tool that lets you capture video from your webcam for whatever purpose you may have. If you're searching for a webcam monitoring app, you'll need to look somewhere else.

Download AMCap 9.20 in Softonic

Camtasia Studio is a complete application suite to record, edit and share your videos online, on CD or with a portable player. This highly-acclaimed program allows you to create screencasts or video tutorials, and can also be used to prepare presentations. Let’s get a run-down of all the things you can do with Camtasia Studio.

Thanks to the Camtasia Recorder, you can record and save screen captures or webcam broadcasts. We enjoyed playing around with it, adjusting the region size, highlighting cursor movement and setting elements such as time stamps and captions. Depending on what you need to record, you can also choose to hide or show the cursor and disable audio recording.

The production studio is the central piece of the application, from where you’ll be doing your editing. Drag and drop your recorded videos onto the timeline at the bottom of the interface. Camtasia embeds a player in the studio interface and you can constantly replay your production. From the menu on the left side you can choose from a selection of 18 different transitions, many call-outs (effectively bubbles to insert text into your video) or captions. The Zoom-n-Pan feature can be used to focus in on one part of the video in particular and teachers can use the Flash Quiz Survey feature to prepare multiple choice tests for their students. Camtasia Studio also includes an audio editor to simply record a voiceover directly to your video or tweak the audio in your production. Use Menu Maker and Theater to create full table of contents and credits pages.

Once you’re happy with your editing and have everything in place, you can go on to produce. Camtasia will guide you through what codecs to choose or what format to set according to your output, whether for the web, for CD, DVD or a portable player. The output format will also depend on whether your video only consists of slides and screen recordings or if you also have digital footage. Camtasia lets you choose among the industry standards like AVI, Quicktime, Real Media or Windows Media. You’ll be able to batch produce your videos and select smooth scaling to lessen quality loss while resizing videos. Production preview is a great feature to take a quick look at your video and correct mistakes before actually producing it. Finally, Camtasia integrates with Screencast.com, meaning you can post your best videos online and share them with others.

Apart from being a full video suite for your PC, it would be a mistake not to talk about the user-friendly aspect of Camtasia Studio. The program offers a number of tutorials, many of them in video format, to explain the different actions you can undertake. The process from recording to editing and producing is well structured and Camtasia Studio will guide you, even suggesting things such as the output format. Whether you’re out to make screencasts or need a friendly and complete tool to prepare presentations, Camtasia Studio is the application of choice.

Download Camtasia Studio 5.0.2 in Softonic

HyperCam is powerful video capture software that records AVI movies (screencam) directly from your monitor, for software presentations, software training, demos, tutorials, and fun! HyperCam supports text annotations, sound, and screen notes (great for creating automated software demos!). You can also select Frame rate and compression quality prior to video capture.

Download HyperCam 2.14.01 in Softonic

TubeHunter downloads videos from YouTube, MySpace, Photobucket, Metacafe, Dailymotion, iFilm, Flurl, Pornotube, Bebo, Break.com, VSocial, Grouper, Bolt, Yikers, Revver, Guba, Vidilife and Blip.tv, and saves them on your computer or directly to your iPOD.

All downloaded videos can be converted by TubeHunter to other video formats including MPEG, MPEG4 AVI, iPOD MP4, MOV, Flash SWF, M4A, PSP, MP3, WAV, OGG, 3GP and 3G2.

TubeHunter does not have any spyware or adware. No personal information is collected, stored, or transmitted by TubeHunter. Tubehunter does not modify your web browser or registry. It does not install any browser plugins or hijackers.

Download TubeHunter 9.6 in Softonic

ProgDVB is a piece of software which allows you to watch SAT-Television and listen to Radio channels directly from satellite by using DVB-PCI cards with hardware decoders on the board, SAT-dish, and personal x86-compatible computers. ProgDVB has options for working with network broadcasting and Audio/Video recording of the stream to different digital-media formats.

Download ProgDVB 5.16.1 in Softonic

Online TV free edition allows you to watch hundreds of television channels from around the world ranging in content from sports to films.

The program works with a TV screen on the left and a channel manager on the right. The channel manager not only includes the channels you can watch, but also multimedia material stored on your hard drive. You can minimise the player into a "mini player" which plays in the top right of your screen so you can watch TV while using other applications. Whatsmore, you can even view photos via Online TV although this seems a bit pointless - the viewer is poor and it's unlikely that anyone would want to view photos in a TV Viewing app. There are two major downsides with the whole application though. One is that many of the TV channel links seem dead or at least, don't work properly. The other problem is that the streaming time can be very long - you can be waiting more than a few minutes for a channel to start with no indication of what status the streaming is at.

The number of channels is impressive but the functionality of them sadly is not.

Download Online TV Free Edition 5.0 in Softonic

There are a lot of programs around that let you create your own screencasts but few that allow you to record literally any video that is playing on your screen. liteCam does though, giving you the chance to grab streaming movies, news broadcasts, webcam footage, as well as capturing your screen actions and adding narrations to make video tutorials.

The program offers a significant number of tools to improve the quality of your screencasts once they've been created, and although the program only allows you to export to AVI, you can always run it through an external file converter to transform the video into any format you desire. I also liked the way you can program liteCam to record the screen at a given time, just like a VHS recorder. I'm no snoop, but I reckon this could be a great way of finding out if the kids have really been on the computer all night doing their homework.

Thanks to a dummy-proof interface, liteCam provides a very easy way in which to capture screen recordings and has enough options for you to be able to polish the resulting video to a decent quality.

Download liteCam 2.5 in Softonic

Although now firmly entrenched in Adobe’s stable of applications, the Macromedia magic that was responsible for so much top quality software oozes through Captivate. Like its sister programs Flash and Dreamweaver, Captivate is designed to provide dazzling presentations for professionals out to impress.

The format of the presentation in question here is not web pages or interactive animated content, but video recordings of your computer being used, allowing you to produce captivating tutorials explaining how to perform technical tasks. More than just allowing you to capture and record screen activity, the application lets you add and edit narration, captions and animations to help you get your point across.

The sound and video editing tools are very comprehensive and if you’re well versed in Macromedia’s ‘Timeline’ interface you should be able to pick things up quite easily and will soon be adding effects, background music and slides to your creations. If not, then perfecting Captivate may take a little time, but the learning curve certainly isn’t as steep as Dreamweaver or Flash.

One of the few drawbacks of the software is that it only allows you to export your finished video as an .swf or an .exe file, although this is a small price to pay for such a fully featured product. Compared with other tools that profess to allow you to record and play back computer actions, Captivate offers a great deal more. Once you’ve mastered the basics, there’s all sorts of wizardry you can apply to make your presentations more immersive and interactive, such as Flash animation, interaction with branching and scoring, as well as highlights, hyperlinks and rollovers.

Download Macromedia Captivate 2.0.0.5166 in Softonic

HS VideoCapture is a tool which captures videos from a video source and records them in avi format. It supports all video / audio codecs installed in the system. It is designed simply, so slower systems may record good quality videos. Recorded video size limit is two gigabytes.

It supports scheduling and a timer which shutdowns the computer after recording is completed which can be very useful when recording is at night. Codecs with good quality compression are available in the internet. Using appropriate codec such as Divx, Mpeg, this software will be a must for your custom videos.

Download HS VideoCapture 1.4 in Softonic

GB-PVR is a fully featured Personal Video Recorder (PVR), allowing you to schedule TV recordings and view and pause live TV. In additional to this PVR functionality, it also acts as a media center allowing you to watch movies, listen to music, view pictures and listen to FM radio.

GB-PVR also supports specialist hardware decoders including Sigma Designs XCard, Hauppauge PVR350 and Hauppauge MediaMVP. GB-PVR also supports multiple tuners, allowing you to record more multiple channels at one time.

Download GB-PVR 1.0.16 in Softonic

DVapp captures in DV type 1 or type 2. It has a preview windows and a timer. It has a timer, which WinDV and Stoik don't and is free. The download comes with a .dll file. I am not a computer expert, but it seems that copying this file to the WINDOWS/system32 directory was necessary for the program to function. Highly recommended for those who need reliable capture with a timer. The program is small, CPU usage is low and dropped frames are not a problem.

Download DVapp 9.0 in Softonic

DScaler 4 is a piece of software that captures video, processes it, and scales it for presentation on a projector or computer monitor. DScaler implements highly sophisticated algorithms that work in real-time to provide PC owners with image quality matched only by very expensive equipment.

DScaler performs a variety of functions:

• Grabbing video from a DVD player, game console, laserdisc, or VCR in a reliable fashion, in either analog or digital form
• Deinterlacing video source, such as sports and news produced with a video camera, as well as console games
• Detecting and removing 2:2 pulldown (PAL) and 3:2 pulldown (NTSC) for movies and filmed television programs
• Reducing video noise on analog sources
• Automatically calibrating video capture cards for optimal brightness, contrast and color
• Manipulating video through gamma, sharpness and other filters
• Viewing still images
• Reducing judder and other video timing anomalies
• Presenting all of the above in the desired resolution and aspect ratio

Download DScaler 4.1.15 in Softonic

FreeGuide is a TV listings viewer that works offline. It downloads listings information from the Internet and stores it for later viewing. The viewer allows the user to view television listings and create customised TV guides by selecting programmes and by building up a favourites list.

Download FreeGuide TV Guide 0.10.3 in Softonic

Web Stream Recorder is the software that allows you to record any Windows Media Video and Audio streams from internet or local network. It can record any music, video, radio broadcasts and adult content.

Web Stream Recorder is extremely easy to use software. All you need is to enter URL to media stream and start the record. It also have a written clips gallery where you can manage captured clips.

Web Stream Recorder have also URL interception module for Internet Explorer. You just need to start Web Stream Recorder. Surf the web and do what you want. Interception module will tell to Web Stream Recorder which possible streams you want to download.

Download Web Stream Recorder Pro 1.610 in Softonic

BT Video Wizard is a utility that records from any video capture source to WMV format. WMV format is the native format used by Windows Media Player for video. WMV format is highly compressed creating great videos in a small file size. This makes BT Video Wizard an excellent choice for recording video email attachments, or for placing videos on the web. Use your web cam to create a 10 minute video of your kids playing to send to Grandma in an email. You can do it in about 300K rather than 50 megabits!

Download BT Video Wizard 6.0.1.4 in Softonic

This handy utility allows you to extract thumbnail images from standard AVI files automatically, or manually. You can then set the program to create a web page thumbnail gallery from these images. This HTML page can be customized with a few different settings, and you can produce multiple pages based on the number of extracted thumbnails.

Some useful features:

• Accurate scene detection performed in real-time
• Personalize your thumbnails with HTML templates
• Create video hyperlinks
• Use formulae, conditional content and formatting
• Simplify deployment with web archive support
• Preview media files (videos, HTML, bitmaps)
• Save your work offline
• Major video formats supported (AVI, MPG, WMV, ASF)

Download Automatic Video Slicer 2.1 in Softonic

iuVCR is a universal video recording program, designed to ensure that you never miss your favorite shows or films. As long as you have a TV tuner or video capture card attached to your machineyou can easily record your favorite TV programs and videos in *.AVI or *.WMV format.

The application boasts an attractive interface, that allows to capture video of any format, resolution and duration. It can automatically start when scheduled and has a number of other useful features, including:

• IEEE 1394 devices support
• TV channels tuning
• Video capturing with frame size up to 768x576
• Arbitrary choice frame size
• Microsoft Windows Media Format support and Windows Media Encoder integration
• Matroska format support

• Video stream preview during capture without frame size limitations
• Most settings autostored in system registry
• Integration with Windows scheduler
• Splitting captured video stream to several files
• Continuous capturing across several disk partitions
• API for third-party remote control applications
• Support for DirectShow filters for realtime video processing

Download iuVCR 4.14.1.378 in Softonic

Video Capturix is a powerful non linear video capture application. The program lets you capture movies (in AVI format) from any Video for Windows or Windows Driver Model (Version 2005 or higher) video source.

You can also freeze video images and save the image in BMP and JPEG format or copy the image to the Clipboard. You can even take timed snapshots to create a movie. A "Full Screen" option lets you transform your monitor into a video screen.

The app also boasts an "Auto start" function, giving you the ability to schedule a date and time to start capturing, a Motion Detector which lets you start recording when video source changes. Other features include: an integrated movie viewer, the ability to print directly from any video source, and the ability to insert copyright information into AVI files.

Download Video Capturix 2006 6.07.830 in Softonic

ChrisTV TimeShift lets you freeze the live TV stream, giving you a break while it's still recording. TimeShifting gives you recordings with time delayed playback which offers various advantages over the linear recording style you were used till now. By TimeShift recording you can fast-forward through commercials and create your instant-replay on a live TV program. Never miss anything from your favourite show, by timeshift recording, a simple pause will let you resume later the interrupted TV program viewing.

Download ChrisTV Professional 5.20 in Softonic