Utility to do Windows screen recording at application level

Question

I am looking for something similar to Camtasia (about which I only read about but haven't had a chance to try yet) geared more to just capturing what user is doing as opposed to producing flashy demos with sound/captions/etc.

The goal is to troubleshoot our application (native Windows executable with GUI, doesn't use OpenGL/Direct3D). What happens often that we cannot easily reproduce user's sequence of steps that led to a problem. If we had a recording of what user was doing it would be much simpler. So recorder has to support fairly high resolution (say 1600x1000) and frame rate (at least 5 FPS I'd say). We don't need to capture sound.

We would like to be able to record only specific application and its child dialogs as opposed to capturing the whole screen.

Another desired feature is to automatically start recording as soon as application is started without having user to do anything.

Answer 1

In MS Windows, you might want to try CamStudio .

Another alternative is to run a VNC server on your workstation, then use something like vnc2flv to record what would be seen through RFB protocol. I've also used vncrec , but I'm not sure if it's maintained anymore. Last VNC option would be rfbproxy which is very good, but hard to use.

I've used VNC-based solutions in both Windows and non-Windows environments, but they can be finicky even for experienced unix geeks. For a Windows-only solution, I recommend CamStudio.

Note that all the VNC options will record the whole screen rather than just one application and its dialogs. I've only used CamStudio to record the whole screen, but it has options for recording just a region of the screen. Not sure if it can be locked to just one application, but it's worth looking at anyway.