Early last week, I received an email advising me of a new screen recording tool known as Screentoaster. Since Techsmith had just announced their $14.95 Jing Pro could record to MP4, post to YouTube, and it appeared to be working well on my Macs, I decided that Screentoaster could wait.

Then, I updated my Quicktime to 7.6 on Mac OS X Tiger and Jing stopped working. In fact, so did every other screen recording application I have (e.g. iShowU), including web-based apps…which seems kind of strange.

One of the apps that I experimented was ScreenToaster. It is pretty versatile recording tool, recording your audio (which it did perfectly) as well as your screen. It also allows for export to multiple formats–all for free. In fact, here’s a screenshot of the initial recording window…it can do a rectangle or full desktop, and get input from your microphone and/or webcam.

Note the 4 minute restriction that Screentoaster folks are trying to extend:

After the recording is finished, you’ll be taken to a screen that looks like this…note the exports to YouTube and AVI:

So, although there is a 4-minute limit for now on recordings, here you have a tool that offers a bit more than Jing Pro at no cost. Of course, I have to mention that this tool didn’t work on my Mac OS X Tiger machine running Quicktime 7.6. I’m guessing all the problems are connected to Quicktime, so we’ll have to see how it all develops.

In the meantime, do check out ScreenToaster.com and share back your impressions and critiques!

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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure