The Download Blog

The freemium screen capture and screen recording application Jing received an update on Tuesday that adds new video functionality to paying users, and a few other enhancements for all Mac and Windows users.

Two hotkeys now help Jing's capture crosshairs snap to common aspect ratios. Press Ctrl to maintain a 4:3 aspect ratio and Shift for 16:9 widescreen proportions. While locked into a ratio, dragging out the crosshair shows you boundaries for common screen measurements within that ratio that you can easily snap to, like 320×240 or 640×480. This is a nice addition in keeping with Jing's visual, low text-density design.

Jing 2.1 adds buttons to export the capture to Camtasia or Snagit.

(Credit: CNET)

After capturing a video or still, Snagit and Camtasia Studio users can export the clip to either of Jing's sister programs. Techsmith, the creator of all three, offers a 30-day trial for Snagit and Camtasia prospectives to give either a try. After taking the capture, click the program icon to continue editing the video or still using those premium tools. In addition to sharing captures with yourself, you can add toolbar shortcuts to push captures to any Screencast.com folder you've set up. In Jing 2.1, you can further let Screencast.com visitors comment on your captures.

As usual, premium users get the most impressive addition. Subscribers to the $15-a-year Jing Pro can now record from their Web cam, and toggle between recording from the Web cam and from the screen. For more details and video clips, read the Jing blog here.

Updated section on Jing on 3/6/09 at 8:30 a.m. PT.

Even if you don't use a screen capture application regularly, there are good reasons to have one on standby. Instead of copying the ID number of an error message into a customer service e-mail by hand, you can quickly take and send a screen shot. Screen shots also make excellent archivers. In a click you can save an image of a flight itinerary or other receipt that you don't want to hang around in paper form. Gamers have another use case--documenting killer performance to prove their bragging rights.

(Credit: Gadwin)

Out of the expansive screenshot category, Gadwin PrintScreen is a freeware standout. It's not the newest or flashiest app, and configuring your preferences is a pain. Once you've set your preferences, however, the impressively feature-rich and completely unobtrusive app gives you a seamless experience from start to finish. While PrintScreen doesn't have its own image editor, setting up the app to automatically open the captured image in your favorite editor is a smart, painless move.

(Credit: TechSmith)

Jing is our first freeware runner-up. Its excellent pedigree shows (its publishers also make SnagIt, described below) in an inventive app that combines basic screen grabbing with the ability to record your movements on the screen. The real draw is being able to quickly and easily upload these images and screencasts to the Web, though you can e-mail images or save them locally as well. Jing's lack of an image editor is one drawback, but its annotation tools are a plus. Those who may see Jing's persistent yellow orb at the top of the screen as a distraction can also hide it and launch Jing directly from the system tray.

(Credit: TechSmith)

To go pro, the top-notch SnagIt comes with a steep price tag that's worth the clams for frequent capturers or those looking for a well-rounded app with advanced features. SnagIt's bag of tricks includes capturing multiple areas of the screen at once, taking timed snapshots, and customizing profiles. The revamped editor very usefully stores every capture you take regardless of whether you save it to disk, and lets you search captures by name or even by Website. Text capture is still ineffective (HyperSnap fared better in our tests), but the image and video tools deliver with force.

(Credit: Fraps)

Gamers have some specialized screen capture apps at their fingertips, like the free-to-try Fraps for DirectX and OpenGL games. In addition to taking stills and video of your game in the throng of the action, Fraps will also perform some benchmarking stats, including how many frames per second flash by while you work your magic.

Two other apps worth mentioning are the solid ScreenHunter Free and CaptureWizPro. You'll find them and a glut of others here.

On Tuesday, TechSmith released Jing Pro, a paid premium version of its free screen capture and casting software. The new service, which runs $14.95 a year, upgrades videos to H.264 encoding, takes off the Jing watermark in the bottom corner of recorded clips, and gives users the option to upload directly to several popular video hosting sites including Facebook, YouTube, Viddler, and Vimeo.

Of the news, one of the biggest changes is the move to the MPEG-4 AVC video format. It's the go-to format for iPods and iPhones, as well as set-top boxes like the Apple TV and TiVo. Likewise, it's been adopted by YouTube, which makes a separate encode for each file for Flash players and hardware that run H.264 clips. This means that going forward your screencast may end up being able to be watched on a wider range of devices.

On the export front I'm a little surprised TechSmith is offering such a simple way to offload captured videos to third-party hosting sites. It's really nice, but will no doubt cut into potential revenue from people who might have paid the extra cash for the company's video hosting sister product, Screencast.com. This service has a higher cap on its file size (2GB up from most service's 1GB max), but limits how many people can watch your content to 2GB of streaming video.

In addition to the launch of Jing Pro, TechSmith put up a new support site called the Jing Help Center, which has a handful of how-to videos and support documents. This is available to both free and pro users.

Download Jing (via CNET's Download)

The team behind the screen-recording utility Camtasia have released a simplified, experimental version of the technology, packaged into a nice downloadable application for Windows and Mac called the Jing Project.

Jing makes it very easy to grab screenshots and videos straight from your PC, and then save them or share them on the Web. The coolest part of this experiment--in theory--is Jing's integration with Screencast.com, a hosting service for videos recorded off your computer. Once you've recorded a video, you can save it to your Screencast account, and from there you can get an embed code to put it in a blog or other page.

The experimental Jing is great, but oddly, the well-established Screencast.com site is the weak link in the chain. It's unattractive, and the embed codes are nearly impossible to find. On the plus side, the Screencast.com trial doesn't apply to Jing users--Jing has announced that the $6.95 monthly fee gets waived for Jing users. Still, Jing really needs a quick and easy way to upload files to more free vid-sharing sites.

FLV uploads are recommended to be in H.264, but other than that, for a clean, flexible, and almost fun way to grab pictures and onscreen videos, Jing really can't be beat.

UPDATE: Jing announced on June 18th that Screencast.com is free for Jing fans.

One of the most effective computer crime-fighting tools in Power Downloader's arsenal is the screen capture. When Power D grabs a cap and uploads it to the Web for the world to see, he knows he's presenting advice to computer users in a very unimpeachable way. Effective screen-capping used to be a tedious multistep process, but the Jing Project streamlines it all for both Windows and Mac users.

Jing streamlines screen capture creation and uploading.

(Credit: Jing Project)

From the team behind the screen-recording utility Camtasia, Jing is able to capture still images as well as videos. Once you've downloaded and installed the program, click the Capture button to begin recording. The program asks you to choose whether you want to capture a video or an image, and then after you're done it lets you preview recording. If you need to edit it, this would be the time.

The coolest part of this experiment--in theory--is Jing's integration with Screencast.com, a hosting service for videos recorded off your computer. The Share button lets you upload the video directly, and offers an embed code, too, but the Web site is jittery and poorly laid out. The site charges $6.95 after the free 60-day trial, but you can still use Jing to record screencaps.

Power Downloader thinks it's more than a bit inelegant to not be able to use its video-hosting upload button, but even that doesn't stop the Jing Project from being a flexible and fun utility worth considering.

YouTube isn't the only way to share video, and it's certainly not the way to store and share professional screencasts with hiked-up bitrates. After 18 months as a beta mewling, on Wednesday, TechSmith's Screencast.com graduated to a full-fledged release.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Version 1 of Screencast.com continues to receive screen recordings produced in the freeware Jing Project (for Windows and Mac) and premium Camtasia Studio, though it's available to anyone willing to register and pay for storage. It has come some distance from the site covered by Webware.com as part of a July 2007 review of Jing Project. Webware editor Rafe Needleman had remarked that

"the well-established Screencast.com site is the weak link in the chain. It's unattractive, and the links you need (the embed codes) are nearly impossible to find. Plus, after 60 days, the free trial service expires--so don't get hooked if you can't stomach the $6.95-a-month fee for screencast hosting."

A lot has changed since then. Screencast.com's makeover addresses most of these critiques. In addition to a revamped interface, said Dirk Frazier, Screencast.com's product manager, in an interview with CNET, "we've moved from what was a very confusing workflow to a polished workflow."

Clicking "Share" pulls up URLs and embed codes you can copy to the clipboard.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Though still simple, Screencast.com's UI is intuitive and pleasant to behold. As a new addition to version 1, a details dialog springs up with each newly created folder. A portlier Help Center features a new design with improved search and deeper answers to common questions. Similarly, a new Tools page lays out links to TechSmith tools, like a media uploader for desktop videos and the MediaRoll embed widget that shares folder content for public folders.

The navigation buttons along the left remain useful for executing uploads and managerial tasks. Clicking an entry in the visual file system similarly offers up intuitive icons to open, edit, delete, or share the recording. (P.S. Clicking "share" is one way to get at those embed codes.)

Screencast.com's developers have also been sweating over back-end changes, like adopting a multiserver architected back-end that can bear more visitors and their recordings. Over the past six months, Frazier added, "lots and lots of improvements have been made on the data center side."

Fans of the service can expect more, too, in the upcoming months. Frazier's blog shares a snippet of Screencast.com's technical road map that includes H.264 encoded playback and social tools to "create a conversation around your content." "Oops," he writes, "that might be too much sharing."

Screencasting is not for everyone. Most of the options out there are fairly full featured, but it's hard to find a good, free solution that can do as much as some of the pricey professional tools such as TechSmith's Camtasia Studio (download) or Adobe's Captivate (download). A new service that launched this week called uTipu (download TipCam for Windows) is stepping into the ring and offering up a Windows-only (for now) one-stop screencasting service that combines both a software tool to grab your onscreen action, along with an uploader that will send it off to uTipu's server farm for YouTube-like Web hosting. The hope is that anyone who wants to make a screencast or two will be able to download the app and get going without too much of a hassle, similar to what TechSmith's been up to with its Jing Project (download for Windows or Mac).

Like other software-based screencasting tools, uTipu's got a few tricks to get your screencasts looking right. You can set it to record your entire screen, or just a small section. It can also follow your cursor, and highlight what you're doing with a little translucent yellow circle. There are recording controls to pause and stop the action, as well as an annotation shortcut in case you feel like drawing on the screen John Madden-style. For audio and voiceovers, there's no post-production workspace, so you have to record your narration at the same time as the video and hope you don't make any mistakes.

Advanced users get some nice tweaks, such as VNC server setup to record screens on remote computers, and frame-rate quality controls to bump up how smooth your videos look. The one caveat is that higher frame rates also increase your file size, and uTipu's only serving up 250MB of free hosting for the time being, but about a minute of medium size video at 15 frames per second runs at about 3MB, which means you'll be able to create and send about 16 videos at the five-minute time cap. If you're close to running out of space, you can also skip the option to upload to uTipu's servers entirely by uploading them to any video hosting service that accepts the FLV Flash format.

On the whole, uTipu's off to a good start, but by not providing some post-processing tools to clean up your work, it's not offering a whole lot more than what you can get from its formidable competition, such as the zero-install Screencast-o-matic, and the cross-platform Jing from TechSmith.

I've embedded a sample of a user-created uTipu video after the break. As you can see, it's nice and big, and you can actually read the onscreen text. My less informative one can be found here.

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As a faithful corporate blogger, I take a lot of screenshots. I've mentioned that in previous roundups of screen capture apps. When I found myself at the Under the Radar conference yesterday (see all posts) without a handy screen capture installed, I quickly downloaded Jing Project, for Windows and Mac.

Jing Project, thoroughly reviewed on Webware.com, floats a sun-yellow ball to the top of the screen. Hovering over this orb produces three rays, one of which launches cross-hairs that, when dragged around content, captures the image. I love this method for high-pressure blogging, even though for everyday use I prefer a more precise, full featured capture program like Snagit, which, like Jing, is made by TechSmith, or the free Gadwin PrintScreen.

The cross-hairs capture method tends to obscure edges, making it hard to see if you've grabbed too little, too much, or just the right amount, but Jing Project gives at least the impression, if not the reality, of saving microseconds when grabbing images from the screen. One note to Windows users: If you don't have the .NET Framework 3.0 already installed, Jing Project will auto-download it, though it will take a few minutes longer before the app installs.