In the last post we test drove an application called Cropper that takes static screen shots of your desktop (full screen or partial). This time we’ll extend it a bit further and look at ways to record screens to produce screencasts. I’m sure all of you have gone to sites such as youtube and seen lots of "how to" videos that had recordings of someones desktop as they walk you through some operation with a monotone voice in the back dictating what they are doing…

Well in this case, we’ll have a look at an application that allows us to create such videos. Now, I’m NOT going to do the monotone voice thing.. however, I will endeavor to get some form of recording going to show you how its done.

The application is called ScreenToaster and it meets my criteria of being free and functional! ScreenToaster is a web-based screen recorder designed to capture your screencasts, do some minimal post-recording activities (such as adding sub-titles, audio etc) and then either stream them directly from their site or download as a video file.

So lets start shall we?

Step 1 – Open up your favorite web browser and go to http://www.screentoaster.com. Here you will have to do the obligatory "registration" by following the Register link on the top menu. Fairly standard stuff.

Couple of things to note:

When I completed the registration, a pop up appeared that stated that a confirmation email was sent out (good), but there was a "Record" button at the bottom!.. I had to click on the "Close" button on the top right of the dialog box to get off that screen and back into the main page. Not a biggie, but may surprise newbies..

Because we want to create and host a video, we have to register. If all you want to do is to watch videos (made by others of course), then you don’t have to register.

Step 2 – Right.. registration done. Confirm your registration by checking your email and clicking on the verify email.. Again, fairly standard here.

Step 3 – The first thing I tried to do once registered is of course to hit the "Start Recording" button to see if anything fancy comes up. Well something did.. I use Chrome for my home browsing and I immediately got a plug-in install request. ScreenToaster requires the latest version of Java to be installed, so if you don’t have that, then you’ll need to download and install that first before you can do anything else. Which is fair enough, so I went ahead and installed it by following the prompts (in Chrome, you get a fancy little bar on the top that says that a plug-in is required.. then you just follow the steps, or alternatively, go here to download and install for Chrome.

Step 4 – If you had to install Java, you’ll need to restart your browser for the install to complete successfully. I did that and finally hit the Start Recording button.

The first time you run this application, you may get some warnings pop up by the Java engine asking for permission to allow ScreenToaster to run. Click on Run to allow it.

Once the applet has loaded, you’ll see this screen. ScreenToaster is hotkey driven (default being alt-S). You can choose whether to capture the whole desktop or a slice as well as microphone and webcam settings.

Its at this point in time where you’ll need to experiment a little :) If you are capturing part of a screen, a black box will appear that you can resize using the corners or move using the top right corner button. It will take some time to get used to the interface. Also, hitting the record button gives you a 5 second grace to get what you really want to capture in front and ready to go :). Hitting Alt-S while recording will naturally pause the recording.

Step 5 – Once you have finished recording, you can hit the Stop Recording button and the following window will pop up.

Here you can preview your video and add subtitles and voice if you like. Adding subtitles can be done by simply pausing the video where you want your subtitle to be, and hitting the subtitle button and entering your text in.. resume.. pause.. enter text in.. resume.. and so forth. Again, it takes a bit of practice. I didn’t play with the mic option. There is even a handy button to change the "preview" image (ie, the first image that pops up when first going to the video or seeing its thumbnails.

Step 6 – Up until now, that video is local… So in order to "Save" it, you will need to upload the video somewhere. Currently you can upload the video to YouTube or to ScreenToaster themselves. Or alternatively, you can "download" it as a flash or movie file.

If you use ScreenToaster to host your video, it will get saved in High Quality. Means it looks better, but takes longer to load, so be aware of your "audience".

As an experiment, I uploaded a video of my uber FreeCell skillz (not!) to ScreenToaster. The resulting page (Click here :)) showed me a screen very similar to youtube :) It also had embed and url links that i can use to share the video. As i have done below..

Your videos can be marked "private" and you can delete them from ScreenToasters servers.

Conclusions

ScreenToaster is a good application.. however, you really need to get used to the interface. The thing that really got to me was that once i uploaded a video to screentoaster, it gave me no way of going back to my video to then upload it to youtube or download it as a flash file… that meant that i had to do the same video all over again.. They are currently working on a way to edit published videos… but not sure when that would be available.

Other things that struck out was the amount of buffering it had to do when playing the HQ videos in ScreenToaster. It was not the fastest shall we say.. But i’m hoping it will get better in the future. This is dependent on your ADSL speed of course, but I get a lot faster responses in YouTube then ScreenToaster.

Lastly, I had a bit of a problem actually getting the recording going on Chrome, so I tried in IE and it worked, and then worked magically in Chrome too.. *shrug*

ScreenToaster has a good FAQ section that does give some general guides and the application’s interface, once gotten used to, is actually quite simple to use.

It has a blog, twitter and rss support, though i didn’t seem to see any forums. That would have been of immense use to give support to this product. I did see in their Twitter page that they are looking into this too.

All in all, a fairly good set of functionality, a little rough around the edges, but excellent idea and once again, free cannot be sneezed at :)

I believe this application will only get better with time and I look forward to actually using this for future articles :) Excellent potential. Good luck chaps and lets see them forums and post-publish functionalities working!

UPDATE: 19th April, 2009 – Updated news on ScreenToaster and forums etc here: http://www.newbtech.com/2009/04/screentoaster-news-and-updates.html

Related Links:

• http://www.screentoaster.com – Home Page
• http://twitter.com/screentoaster – ScreenToaster Twitter