oCam

oCam captures and records onscreen images and video and audio. One advantage it offers over other free screen capture utilities is the ability to choose codecs from a toolbar menu. It has a two-part interface, consisting of a main screen and a green-bordered capture area that you can drag to resize and place over the screen area you want to record.

PROS

Recording: We could record video and audio or just video. The ability to record audio makes it easy to narrate or annotate onscreen activity, or you can skip the audio and add your own soundtrack later.

Options: Plenty of options make oCam easy to customize. Some examples: Watermarks, Languages, Hotkeys, and Mouse Effect, as well as video settings such as Timelimit. Encoding options include multi-core processing, audio bit rate, and encoder thread count (an experimental feature).

External codecs: In addition to oCam’s built-in codecs, you can specify external codecs, including a page of codecs recommended by the developer.

CONS

Documentation: Onscreen documentation seems machine-translated, or partly so, and barely intelligible in places. The ads by Google take up a lot of screen space and get in the way of the documentation, too.

Missing window: After closing oCam, the screen capture window disappeared. Clicking Capture produced an awkward error message: “Not found the record target window.”

BOTTOM LINE

While oCam has some advantages, its balky capture window and nonsensical instructions dampen our enthusiasm. Still, it’s worth a try.