Screenium & Mac Screencasting Software
January 10th, 2008 by Greg R Notess
I came across an announcement of a free Mac screencasting software package called Screenium. It is currently available for free in its Preview Version (and looks like it will cost $20 later). I don’t have a Mac, so I cannot easily test it. I’ll have to say my one complaint about most Mac screencasting software is that it only gives QuickTime as an output option, and not Flash. Unless you know your audience primarily uses Macs, I prefer to use Flash output for the greatest accessibility.
My complaint with Screenium (untried), is that their Web site does not even include an example screencast that could be produced by their product. Show me a demo! (And it would be nice if they said what output options are available as well.)
For Screenium, other Mac screencasting software, and some interesting commentary on screencasting in general, see the post at tuaw, especially in the comments. And if anyone creates a Screenium screencast, let me know so I can link to an example.
Just tried it out and it was ok, but nothing special. Only output appears to be .mov, which is at least one of the formats you can use to upload to YouTube. I’m currently using iShowU, and find that it offers quite a few more options than Screenium. Screenium offers four capture types – full screen, screen area, specific window, or follow the mouse. I couldn’t get specific window to work – it would only record one corner of my screen and I couldn’t move it. Follow the mouse worked well, but didn’t show exactly what was being recorded during the recording, so it’d be easy to miss something – I’d prefer to see stuff that wasn’t being recorded grayed out, as they do with the screen area. I also couldn’t get the hot text to work reliably – this is an attempt to allow you to pop predefined text up on the screen during the recording, but it doesn’t display WHILE you’re recording, only on the playback, so I didn’t think it was working at all at first. The software’s pretty and works ok – certainly not bad for free!