Camtasia Studio is not CamStudio

Chad Wandler (from Split Rock Communications) was listening to the stream from BloggerCon this weekend, overhearing me answering a question about screencasts. For clarification purposes, he informed me that Camtasia Studio and CamStudio have nothing to do with each other and never have. Per the CamStudio’s History site:

CamStudio was originally released by a company called RenderSoft who were subsequently bought by a company called eHelp who used some of the technology in their program, RoboDemo. Some time later, eHelp was bought by Macromedia who wanted RoboDemo (which was to become Captivate).

Knowing that CamStudio did some of the stuff RoboDemo did for free (mainly export to streaming Flash), it looks like they released a newer version of CamStudio (2.1) which fixed some bugs but most importantly, removed certain features, mainly the ability to create SWFs and you were required to register to use it… lovely - and over time, links to the various webpages that had CamStudio and it’s source code were became broken. However, I’ve managed to find the earlier version 2.0 complete with the related CamStudio video codec (comparable to Techsmith’s excellent TSCC), the source code for both and just put the website up so people can download them…

No wonder I was confused - that’s a confusing story! The long and short of it is that CamStudio is on on SourceForge for all you would-be screencasters. And through NickTheGeek’s CamStudio page, I discovered Open Source Alternatives. Awesome!

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