Screen Toaster Beta
ScreenToaster is a Java based application for recording (almost all) of what is on your screen. It works.. They claim cross platform (Windows, MacOS and Linux). The embedded video above shows me ‘presenting’ an Impress file on my Ubuntu box. The result is impressively small in file size. I’m going to get the sound card set up properly (alsamixer joy ahead) and see if I can do a screen cast with synchronised sound.
This is an early closed beta I simply emailed and asked for a user key and it arrived within a couple of days. Future features include local file export, and export directly to YouTube.
The only ‘bugs’ I have come across yet are
- Drawing objects (text boxes with typing) are not being recorded in OpenOffice Impress, so I can’t make a video showing how to draw a flow chart
- In the presentation above, I follow a link to a Web site. Firefox was not picked up by the recording application.
- Workaround: switch off ‘video effects’ in the Ubuntu settings so there is no hardware acceleration while recording. This was sorted by exchange of e-mail with the Screen Toaster people, and they are working on improving the tolerance of the recorder to hardware acceleration.
If sound works OK, I can live with both of those. I think ScreenToaster was mentioned on DaringFireball, but I can’t find the reference now amid all the stuff about Opera on the iPhone.