I am always on the look out for useful tool or software that can make my computer tech life much easier. Sometimes I am not very good at words and it’s tough for me to explain to a basic computer user on how does a particular technology/software works. One very good method to teach a person how to burn a CD or use any software is by screen recording. Early last year I’ve introduced CamStudio, a free and easy to use screen recording software. It is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs).
However, it can be another problem when the user is unable to play the AVI file because of a missing codec or SWF file because of missing Adobe Flash Player. The best way is to record onscreen changes to a self-played EXE file because all Windows computer should be able to run executable file. Here’s a free screen recording software that can save it to EXE.
SCREEN2EXE is an easy-to-use tool to capture desktop activity and save it as a self-playing .exe file. The program will capture mouse movements, clicks and even optional audio comments from your microphone. You can choose to record the entire screen or just a selected area, configure the recording quality and also the frame rate. The captured video is highly compressed and saved as standalone .EXE viewer that can be sent by email or made available for download.
Screen2EXE is very easy to use as it only requires 4 step. The first step is to select the region that you want to record, or full screen. At step two, you get to select the quality of the output. If you select Very good, almost lossless, the file will be slightly bigger than Efficient grayscale. You can try them out to see which one suits you the best. You also get to select the frame rate and mic recording. The third step allows you to start recording. It also shows that you can press the F10 key to stop recording or F9 to pause/resume recording. You get to preview the recorded screen at the final step. If you’re satisfied with your screen recording, you can go ahead and save it to an executable file.
Why not AVI? Well, an AVI file need right codec to play, to achieve compatibility, most AVI outputting screen recorders must use codec which system installed in default. But, those system codec are designed for general videos not for screens. When use it to compress screen video, the output file is very huge! For example, a 1024×768, 1 minute screen video could take up to 10MB. Compare to SSCV2 which is used in SCREEN2EXE, it outputs only 2MB.The same thing happens to SWF and other general formats. Now you do the math, AVI or EXE?
Here’s the test I did. I recorded full screen for a minute on all video quality.
– SCREEN2EXE
Very good, almost lossless quality: 462KB
Good: 362KB
Efficient grayscale, smallest file: 294KB
– CamStudio with 70% video quality and Microsoft Video 1 compressor (codec).
AVI: 25.6MB
SWF: 1.64MB (The conversion from AVI to SWF takes a while)
Convinced why not AVI? Well if you still prefer AVI or SWF, use CamStudio. If EXE, download Screen2EXE at the link below.
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