In the world of computers sometime it becomes tough to instruct or explain others about how-to accomplish a specific task in their computer. Providing instructions in terms of text or by oral means cannot be as effective as supposed to be.
However screen recording can be a helpful solution for the issue. e.g. You can record a "how-to" video to help someone learn how to install a software, prepare a presentation, the gaming instructions, how to draw in graphic design programs etc.
There are many softwares available that can help you with the screen recording process. Recording here means to capture whatever you are doing on your computer screen, save as a video file and send it to a friend or upload it on YouTube.
If you are looking for such screen recording tools, here we have compiled a list of Top 13 Free Screen Capturing and Recording Tools. Most of these will work on Windows platform but some of them also have support for MacOS or other operating systems.
These listed softwares support recognized file formats so that the saved video can be easily edited in other most common video editing softwares.
TinyTake is a free screen capture & video recording software for Microsoft Windows & Mac. With TinyTake, you can capture images and videos of your computer screen, add comments and share them with others in minutes.
The capturing is easy and you have to select the type of screen capture you would like to make from the desktop client menu.
It also allows you to annotate your screenshots and videos with text box, arrows, highlight and more.
CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs).
CamStudio can also add high-quality, anti-aliased screen captions to your recordings in seconds. It is packed with its own Lossless Codec that produces crystal clear results with a much smaller filesize compared with other more popular codecs, like Microsoft Video 1.
Camstudio is 100% free for personal and commercial use.
With SnapCrab you can capture any area (full screen or a specified region) on your desktop and then save them in PNG, JPEG or even GIF format.
Furthermore, you can also capture web pages from your browser by linking through Sleipnir.
Another greate feature is that you can directly post captured images to Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, or save them to Evernote.
Greenshot is a light-weight screenshot software tool for Windows with the following key features:
- Quickly create screenshots of a selected region, window or fullscreen; you can even capture complete (scrolling) web pages from Internet Explorer.
- Easily annotate, highlight or obfuscate parts of the screenshot.
- Export the screenshot in various ways: save to file, send to printer, copy to clipboard, attach to e-mail, send Office programs or upload to photo sites like Flickr or Picasa, and others.
Greenshot was published under GPL, i.e. you can download and use it free for personal and commercial use.
Monosnap is another free, fast and easy to use screen capturing application both for Windows and MacOS X. Some of the key features include:
- Capture full screen, just part of the screen, or a selected window
- Make your crop area pixel perfect with our 8x magnifier
- Customize screenshooting hotkeys
- Highlight important details with pen, text, arrows and shapes
- Hide private information with our blur tool
- Login to get free cloud storage space
- Upload your snapshot to our storage in one click
- Or save it to your local folder and copy it to clipboard
Screenshot Captor is a best-in-class tool for grabbing, manipulating, annotating, and sharing screenshots. It's different from other screenshot utilities in several notable ways:
- Optimized for taking lots of screenshots with minimal intervention
- Super easy to add and edit callout arrows and text boxes
- Easy automatic or on-demand uploading of screenshots to image hosting services
- Take snapshots from webcams
- Smart autonaming of files and format conversion
- Ability to embed textual comments or captions to images
- Multi-monitor support and lots of capture modes
- Deluxe thumbnail maker and watermarker
7capture is fast and easy to use high quality screen capture software for Windows environment. With this you can take perfect quality screen capture of the Window's round corners and transparent backgrounds.
It is also capable of exporting your screenshot as semi-transparent PNG, JPEG, GIF or BMP images. 7capture is a free for personal or commercial use.
Screenpresso is an image and video capturing utility and you can capture your desktop (screenshots and HD videos) for for any purpose like as training documents, collaborative design work, IT bug reports, and more.
It is a light-weight screen grab tool with built-in image editor, user guide generator (supports PDF) and sharing options.
You can even share or publish your captures to Evernote, Google Drive, Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox and more.
PC Screen Capture is one free powerful, lightweight, full-featured screen capture tool for Windows platform.
It allows you to take screenshots from any part of your screen in four ways, you can capture full desktop, active window, selected area and selected object, and save images in BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG formats.
There is no need to install it and you can directly run this from USB. It is a freeware and you can use it free for personal or commercial use.
Screen Capturer allows you to instantly capture any area of the screen to a file or email. Simply press the PrtScrn key on your keyboard to see the dialog below and select the desired capture option.
Some of the key features include:
- Capture screenshots, animations (screencasts), full screen, active or selected window or selected area of the screen
- Capture screenshots to clipboard, image file, e-mail or printer
- Save screenshot image in popular formats as .jpg, .gif, .jpg, .bmp and .tiff
- Capture screencast animations to highly compressed video files (WMV) with sound
- Support for multiple monitors
Ezvid is free screen recorder with built-in editor. With one click, you can record your screen with Ezvid, and capture whatever appears on your computer screen: Web pages, games, applications, paint programs, maps and more.
You can also edit your video and then save it for later, or upload it directly to YouTube.
With its powerful ediotor, you can nonlinearly edit the videos, make speed changes, re-arrange, add text, image slides and much more.
FlashBack Express is the most advanced free screen recorder, capable to create high quality, high frame rate movies, demos and tutorials. Its continuous recording mode lets you record forever.
In schedule recording mode you can can start and stop recording at set times, or when applications run and close - great for recording online events. The key features include:
- One click upload to YouTube
- Share Url
- Embed movie in web page
- Export to Flash or AVI
You will also have the full control over the file size and quality of the recordings.
These are the commonly used free screen capturing software that we found useful for commercial use as well. If you have any feedback or recommendation, please use the comments box below.