InquiryLabs
Politics, Programming and Possibilities
Finding a Screencasting Tool for Mac OS X
Author: Duane Johnson4 Mar
It’s taken me a suprisingly long time to find a decent screencasting / screen recording tool for Mac OS X. I tried SnapZ and didn’t like the complexity. Nor the price.
vnc2swf is an interesting and free option, but it doesn’t come with built-in sound recording, and I couldn’t find a shell-based alternative to the linux-only arecord alsa audio recording tool. In addition, the coupling between OSXvnc and the recording tool means you need to change the resolution of your screen using the pref pane to 800×600 if you want to make browser-friendly screencasts. That made things feel a little crunched on my 20″ iMac.
So what other options are there? The most comprehensive list I could find was at answers.com. In the end, I chose ScreenRecord, due to its simplicity and fair price: I’m willing to shell out $20 for this.
4 Responses for "Finding a Screencasting Tool for Mac OS X"
Sadly, snapz is the best thing out there for the Mac. I feel your pain…
I agree with Pat on:
A) SnapzPro is the best thing out there and
B) It is expensive
But given that I just watched you sit down and explain how your bundle enhancements work without spending a dime on travel, or any time on the phone figuring out when we both could meet.. I’d say Snapz is a bargain. I could barely watch your video as it was so hard to see what was actually on the screen. It was more effective as a sound file.
So anyway.. I guess we’re all in violent agreement. It should be easier to do this without spending alot of money. I guess I’m just suggesting that you reconsider what alot of money is in this case.
Thanks for all the great work on the bundles and plugins!
Larry
I found this on another blog, it looks like a halfway reasonable alternative. I’m installing all of the required packages, but it might be worth a shot.
Bryan
Sorry, I could have sworn I had attached a link. I’ll try it again: http://ejohn.org/blog/free-screencasts-osx/
The first time I installed everything, the screencasting worked decently, however, there was no mouse in the video. The solution seems to be to run the python version of vnc2swf, which looks like a crazy rabbit whole all on its own.
I went a little install-happy and installed the port for py-game, after installing the ‘recommended’ pygame osx packages: http://pythonmac.org/packages/ but it did no good. Finally I looked at my path (from the X11 terminal) and found that my path was pretty weak. I added everything that was missing from my path, and finally got through the ‘pygame library not installed’ message, only to come up to a ‘Python may not be configured for Tk’ error.
Long story short, I think I have a mess on my hands
If anyone else has gotten this to work, I’d love to hear how you did it.