Film desktop actions . .

[all_the_while]

hello all.
I would like to know if anyone knows of a program that can 'film' desktop actions. For example if i want to make a user guide of a program, i could film certain actions (ie navigating menus, configuring the program etc) and then dub in a voiceover.
Thanksin anticipation

[killingspree]

camtasia ... http://www.techsmith.com/products/studio/default2.asp

do not know any freeware to do the same though!
steVe

[all_the_while]

thanks killingspree ill check that, its much appreciated.

Incidentally (not that i dont think the content and service provided here by doom9 team is not excellent) how about some video guides? im surprised we dont see more of them and specially here

[killingspree]

what do you mean by video guides? if you mean something like analogue video editing, this will never be around here. but if you are looking for something like capturing analogue video to hard disk, we've got this guide already:
www.doom9.org/capture/start.htm

steVe

[all_the_while]

sorry, i was thinking more like producing some of the guides in a video rather than text format, programs like camtasia make that really easy.

But the guides are already excellent anyway . . .

[qwerpoi]

The precise software you are looking for is CamStudio, here is their website:

http://www.rendersoftware.com/products/camstudio/index.htm

I've used it myself, although not recently, and it is extremely friendly, and it's freeware.

[killingspree]

oh ok... well there's only one problem with such a kind of guides:
bandwith. even now, when the guides only have a lot of pictures in them they produce huge amounts of bandwiths, i can't even imagine how this would be if those were all in video format. besides the fact that it would take for ages for users like me to dl them (64k dial up connection).

another point is that a lot of people use those guides as a reference and therefore don't always need the whole guide, but rather only a specific part.

updating those guides would be guite hard too i can imagine (:

steVe
PS: i don't want to discourage you of making such a guide though. if you can host it yourself i'm sure it would be a nice addition to the existing guides!