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WARNING - Sessions longer than 20 mins may be lost!

edited February 2010 in General Discussion
I tried using CamStudio 2.00 (running on Windows 7) to record a website usability test session, after testing everything to make sure it worked. I could hear my hard disc clicking happily all through the recording, but when I stopped the recording it said the file couldn't be saved. I checked windows/temp but there was nothing there either. The whole session was lost. Grrr. :-(

Even worse, after reading through this forum, I discover this is a known problem due to a 2GB maximum file size limit for avi files. Hence there are many postings here with titles like "no avi file". Could someone please add a highly visible WARNING to the software and its documentation about this? Software that out of the box appears to work for 20 minutes or so then fails without warning or notification is highly dangerous IMHO. I shudder to think how much work has been lost as a result.

There are also several menu options that are obviously broken, e.g. Options/Record audio from speakers, Tools/Video annotations and Help/Frequently asked questions, and flash encoding doesn't work. At the risk of seeming ungrateful, I would say that with so many serious problems this is really an alpha-quality release and should be labelled as such, at least until the basic features work. It's a shame because the only alternative seems to be the very expensive Camtasia.

Comments

  • edited October 2010
    Hi Philmck

    Sorry to hear about your negative experiences with CamStudio.

    Just to clarify, you can get longer than 20 minutes recording with CamStudio, providing you choose your video and audio codecs carefully and keep the amount of screen area you want to record to the minimum you need. See this [Sticky] post:

    http://camstudio.org/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=251

    The Record audio from speakers option works fine on my XP machine but not on my Vista laptop. Just because it doesn't work on your machine, doesn't mean the function is "broken" ... a workaround exists with soundcards that CamStudio doesn't like (for whatever reason).

    The reason the menu options are broken or go to other websites is due to the fact that CS2.0 had links to the original (long gone) developers. As I mention on the homepage, I'm not a programmer and I didn't create CamStudio ... I'm just trying to keep this last Open Source version alive so it can be improved upon and with the help of some volunteer coders we're getting there, but it takes time and all of us have work and families that need to take precedence.

    A beta of 2.6 exists on BleeBlaps website here: http://www.bleeblap.com/CamStudio/weeklybuilds.php - try it out and see if that's any better for you.

    ******
    Comment Oct 2010: Use the v26b R273 or higher instead of version above
    ******


    Eradicating the 2GB file limit size is going to take a bit of time to achieve as a function to create OpenDML (AVI 2.0) formatted AVIs has to be written, but we're well aware of the issue and is high on the priority list.

    CamStudio is most definitely NOT alpha.

    Thanks

    Nick
  • Hey!

    I also exceeded the 2GB barrier without realizing it on some of my files and, just like you, they wouldn't open.

    HOWEVER, you may just be in luck. I used the MediaCoder program to transcode the corrupt files and it worked BEAUTIFULLY! Not only did it recover the files but it took the 2.8ish GB files down to about 250 MB each in the process, so it was a win win for me.

    http://www.mediacoderhq.com/

    The version you want to get is the full edition.

    I hope this works for you and good luck!
  • Summary
    ========

    2+ GB Avi recording will not open with regular players.
    But MediaCoder can help you to open files bigger that 2HB
    MediaCoder was previously available in SourceForge.
    We are thinking about to add the orginal MediaCoder as an option in Camstudio.

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    Discussion closed
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This discussion has been closed.