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

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

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

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

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

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 5.15.7 in Softonic

Kastor!TV is free and is fully functional based on P2P technology to bring you hundreds of TV channels.

You just need to have TV watching hardware installed on your computer such as a TV card. K!TV is now compatible with most TV-PC hardware.

K!TV uses Electronic Program Guide (EPG) technology to make your life simpler. Thanks to the integrated nxtvepg software, at any time you can view information about TV shows, read summaries of films you are viewing etc.

Every time you switch channel, K!TV gives you the name and time of the actual show you are viewing. Try it today!

Download Kastor! TV 2.3.0.1 in Softonic

Turk.TV allows you to recieve up to 750 streaming channels from hundreds of countries around the world. There is no need for a PC TV card because the channels are streamed through your internet connection and the developers claim it even works with a 56K dialup connection. However, you'll only get decent picture and sound quality on a broadband connection.

You can watch in regular or full screen mode and there's no subscription required to watch any of the channels. It also features automatic TV station updates so it never goes out of date.

If you are interested in alternative programming, learning languages, foreign cultures, entertainment, games, sports or news, then you'll find Turk.TV for you.

Download Turk.TV 3.0 in Softonic

Adobe Captivate 2 software enables anyone to rapidly create powerful and engaging simulations, software demonstrations, and scenario-based training without programming knowledge or multimedia skills.

Use Adobe Captivate 2 to record any application quickly and easily. Capture onscreen activity and let Adobe Captivate 2 automatically generate interactive text entry areas.

Rapidly develop soft-skills training with even the most complex branching scenarios. Quickly create interactive, engaging training content without learning Flash or hiring a professional developer.

Its all there to make the most complete tutorial videos.

Download Adobe Captivate 2 in Softonic

Replay Media Catcher is smart - it figures out the name of the video or MP3 file you've recorded, and names the file automatically. This makes it easier than ever to organize your recorded media. For MP3 files, the artist, album, song title and other information are added to the ID3 tags - this makes your recorded songs appear as they should in iTunes, Windows Media Player, or any other program that plays MP3 files.

Features:

• Record all kinds of FLV format Flash Videos
• Capture streaming MP3 files
• Automatically names songs and video files
• One click recording
• MP3 tag editor
• Works great for hard-to-capture sites using RTMP protocol

Download Replay Media Catcher 2.30 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

Solway's Internet TV and Radio Player allows you to listen to over a thousand free radio and TV stations online over the Internet. You can actually listen to, or watch stations directly, without having to visit web sites and put up with their slow-loading pages and pop-up ads.

This is what this application has to offer:

• Record straight to MP3
• No additional hardware is required
• Watch video in full-screen if you wish
• Supports both Windows Media and Real Video

Download Solway's Internet TV and Radio Player 1.54 in Softonic

Free Internet TV is an Internet television tuner program that allows you to view over 1300 online TV stations from around the world(see channel list). There is no need for a PC TV card because the TV channels are streamed through your internet connection.

Although 56K internet connection is adequate, a high speed internet connection will deliver superior audio and video quality. This software comes with free automatic TV station updates so it will never be out of date. If you are interested in learning languages or alternative programming, this is a good choice for you!

Features of Free Internet TV:

• Over 1300 free TV stations
• No TV card required
• Automatic TV station updates
• Thousands of skins
• Personalized channel favorites
• Regular or full-screen mode
• Easy-to-use interface

Download Free Internet TV 6.2.0.0 in Softonic

This application enables you to record video from any image source on your PC, be it the screen itself or a USB video device connected to your computer, such as a digital video camera or a webcam.

Debut Video Capture is very easy to use: its interface offers a preview of what will be recorded, although in the case of screen recording, this is pretty confusing as the image repeats itself ad finitum. Besides that, everything is controlled with three simple buttons (record, pause and stop) so that gives you an idea about the simplicity of the program.

Recordings can be done in a variety of formats, and each one has its own configuration settings. An interesting option is the possibility to download related programs from the same developer. Debut Video Capture also enables you to email the videos or upload them to an FTP server right after recording them. However, we did miss an embedded player with which to revise our recordings.

Download Debut Video Capture 1.20 in Softonic

Broadcaster's StudioPRO allows you to capture any video playing on your screen including live streaming video and pre-recorded video clips playing on any media player. StudioPRO allows you to play video files or live streams through your web camera output while allowing you to split your camera output into multiple outputs. With StudioPRO you can broadcast simultaneously on multiple camera chat sites including Yahoo Messenger, MSN messenger, and Skype.

Capture and Record

If it can play on your computer, you can capture and record it. StudioPro lets you capture any video file on your hard drive or any live streaming video playing in an Internet browser or media player. StudioPro then lets you record and save from those sources in a variety of file formats and compression qualities.

Broadcast

StudioPro uses your webcam output to enable you to play virtually any file over your webcam chat programs such as Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, and Skype. You can build play lists from video files you have stored on your hard drive and then simply play those files to everyone viewing your webcam.

Camera Splitting

Up until now, you could only use you webcam on one service or chat program at a time. StudioPRO let's you split your webcam output to multiple services and chat programs simultaneously in real time.

Download Broadcaster's StudioPRO 1.3.0 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

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

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

DVD Snapshot is an application that allows you to create wallpapers of your favorite films or maybe create a personal photographic collection of your beloved actors. Just insert the title you would like to take a screenshot of, then when the film is at the right point, press the “Snapshot” button and that’s it.

You can also select the zoom level to capture a selection of your original video. Theoretically you could also load different video format, such as MPEG, AVI and WMV, unfortunately this option is not available in the trial version. Another major limitation is that protected DVDs might not run. The only solution I can think of is to create an unprotected copy of the title you need to take the screenshots first. You can do so by using programs like DVDFab Gold, but clearly it’s not worth it if all you wanted was just one screenshot of your favorite film. An online image research would probably be much quicker!

DVD Snapshot could be a useful application but the limitation it has on protected DVDs might make it impossible to capture a scene of your favorite actor or preferred film.

Download DVD Snapshot 1.5.15.1 in Softonic