Screenshots or captures are a great way to show people how something looks like on your screen. Windows already provides a build-in way to capture your screen(s).

If you press the “Print Scrn” button on your keyboard (it’s usually right above the “Insert” key) Windows will capture your current screen and store it in the clipboard. Usually you paste it into MsPaint or directly into your favorite office application.

To capture the current active window of e.g. your webbrowser you just have to press ALT+Print Scrn and Windows will copy the image of the active window into the clipboard. So far so good.

If you have to work with screenshots on a daily basis you won’t be very happy with the Windows solution. For example I need to make screenshots of applications to prove to the developers that there’s a certain bug in their fancy new program. I started to look around for a tool which is easy and fast to handle, preferably free, lets me draw some circles or rectangles on the captured image and allows me to save the captures directly into files without the need to start mspaint.exe.

Greenshot – Tiny, incredibly powerful screen capture tool

So I stumbled upon the free, open source tool called “Greenshot”. It features an own image editor which lets you to instantly edit the screenshot you’ve just made.

If you start up Greenshot and hit the “Print Scrn” button on your keyboard your cursor will turn into a crosshair which lets you to specify the region on your monitor to be captured.

After you have done that your screen will flash and the build-in image editor opens up where you can make further changes to your capture like crop it, write text, draw rectangles, circles or arrows and even obfuscate the parts you don’t want the recipients of your screenshot to be able to read.

And still, you’re able to capture single windows, or your complete screen(s). BTW, you can even capture the output of your video player which displays the picture in overlay mode!

Click on the Greenshot logo to get it or read more on what it can do for you!

What is VLC?

VLC is a free, multi-format and open source media player application written by the VideoLAN project.

But playing your favorite movie or audio files is not the only thing it can do. It is also able to encode and stream audio or video content.

The other nice fact is, that it is running under a multitude of operating systems like Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BeOS and BSD.

What types of streams can I record with it?

With VLC you can easily record MMS, WMF and ASF streams.

Tell me how already!

To record a stream you first need to get the streaming URL. You can mostly do that be right-clicking the video picture and selecting “Properties…”:

Look at the “Location” info on the Properties dialog:

Mark and copy the link by pressing CTRL+C and start up VLC. Now go to Media -> Convert/Save… click on the Network tab and paste the URL you copied from the stream earlier into the text box. It should look like this:

The next thing you have to do is to click on Convert / Save and you will see this dialog:

First, enter the file name of the destination file including the extension, e.g. NasaTV.asf
Tick the “Display the output” check box to see how the stream looks like while you’re recording. Then you select the Profile, which defines how the file format will be recorded as and click “Start”. I usually use “Video – WMV + WMA (ASF)”.

Now you will have to be patient, because it can take up to 1 minute, depending on your internet connection, for VLC to start displaying and recording the stream. When you think you have recorded enough, just click on the stop button to close the file you’re currently recording into.

You can download the VLC player on the official website.

You need to make tutorial videos to teach your new colleagues how to work with a certain application. Now you could create training documents and have some long or boring training session to teach them stuff they often don’t get after the training anyways.

The other option would be to just record step-by-step tutorials of your application. Your new colleagues would just copy over some training videos and watch them to see how to use that new software right.

The solution

Exactly for this reason, and probably because of my lazyness, I found a very nice free application called “Wink” coded by Debugmode.

Here’s the description from the official Wink website:

That sounds great, right? It is! You can just download it, install it (Windows or Linux with GTK 2.4 or higher) and create great looking flash videos of how you perform a certain action you want to show to your friends or colleagues. The tool itself has a pretty straight forward user interface which allows you to create a professional looking tutorial video. Either you capture your whole screen, a predefined area or a custom area of your screen.

But you can do much more than just record your desktop. You can add a voice recording to your video, add text comments, draw shapes, add weblinks links, etc. This tool is really advanced when it comes down to features. Also, editing your recording frame by frame can by done easily.

You can download this piece of software goodness by clicking on the Wink logo:

I really hope you’ll enjoy this tool as much as I did