About CamStudio

CamStudio 1.0 was originally open source released in 2001 by a company called RenderSoft.

A couple versions were released afterwards under the GNU Public License 2.0.

A company called eHelp either bought RenderSoft or the rights to the software some time after to use in their software RoboDemo.

When they did that, they released the free CamStudio 2.1 (2.0 being the last open sourced version publicly released) fixing a couple of bugs and removed the ability to generate SWF (Flash!) versions of the videos, using CamStudio 2.1 as a "lead generator" to their paid RoboDemo as an alternative.

You might say, "Big Deal!" but back in the mid 2000s, Flash and SWF video was the king of webvideo and could be viewed by anyone who had the free Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash browser viewer.

The only "native" video CamStudio could create were videos in AVI 1.0 format which were restricted to a certain maximum size, had some other disadvantages and meant you had to mess around with weird and wonderful video and audio codec and settings to try and get the maximum amount of recording time as possible, most of which was outside the wheelhouse of lesser-tech-savvy users.

As a happy CamStudio user, I just thought I'd help the community out by finding the last 2.0 version and its source code, bought "CamStudio.org" and in May 2005, chucked up the website and just made it available.

Needless to say it got popular. At its peak, CamStudio.org had around 7 million visitors a year.

During the same time, eHelp was bought by Macromedia who turned RoboDemo into Captivate and in turn Macromedia was bought by Adobe.

All the while CamStudio just chugged away on it's own little website but while I did get occasional help from a couple of people here and there over the years (THANK YOU ALL!) there wasn't much I could really do to improve it as I wasn't a programmer and as a dad of 2 and also having to look after family members with long-term medical conditions - I simply didn't have the time or the mental bandwidth.

So over the years, I just let CamStudio be, watching other screen recording software overtake and become the new kids on the block.

Fast forward to 2024.

After seeing the potential that AI could help non-coders produce their own software, I decided to try my hand.

It was crap. LOL!

But during my researching, I found public domain screen recorders that could be use as the basis of the next evolution of CamStudio - and maybe ... MAYBE ... honing my "vibe coding" skills, I could use super-smart AIs like OpenAI, Claude Sonnet, Grok etc. to add new features to make it even better.

So here we are today: CamStudio V3

I'll be publishing a feature roadmap soon of features I'm looking to add.

In the meantime, enjoy CamStudio V3 ... because this is just the beginning ...