Having looked into a number of free video / audio capture software options in order to create our instructional videos, including WINK and CAM STUDIO (two popular free options) we ran into a number of issues

  1. Lack of MPEG or AVI video export options – too often only SWF (Flash), which is not compatible with Youtube (WINK) – note that YOUTUBE does not support flash video (we also tried a number of YOUTUBE like services which supported SWF video, however in the end we were not happy with the quality of rendering these offered)
  2. Limited recording time for free versions (MANY OF THE NON FREE VERSIONS APPLY THIS TO DEMOS)
  3. Poor quality rendering (CAM STUDIO)

We settled on a payed product called Jing which provided just the functionality we needed with a slick interface at a yearly subscription fee of $15US which we found reasonable (SNAGIT was a close contender however it was unable to support video capture on the MAC version!).  Please let us know if you come across any useful alternatives!

jing image

Find below a tutorial video we captured using jing and uploaded to Youtube