CamStudio is an open-source

screencast A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture or a screen recording, often containing audio narration. The term ''screencast'' compares with the related term ''screenshot''; whereas screenshot ...

ing program for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

released as

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

. The software renders videos in an

AVI Avi is a given name, usually masculine, often a diminutive of Avram, Avraham, etc. It is sometimes feminine and a diminutive of the Hebrew spelling of Abigail. People with the given name include: * Avi (born 1937), Newbery award-winning Americ ...

format. It can also convert these AVIs into

Flash Video Flash Video is a container file format used to deliver digital video content (e.g., TV shows, movies, etc.) over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player version 6 and newer. Flash Video content may also be embedded within SWF files. There ar ...

format, embedded in SWF files. CamStudio is written in

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

, but CamStudio 3 will be developed in C#. The program has distributed malware and harmful viruses via the installer.

History

The original CamStudio was released as an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

product by RenderSoft software in October 2001. The source code license was converted to the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

in December 2002 with release 1.8. The Source code of versions 1.0, 1.4 and 2.0 are still available at

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirrorin ...

. In 2003, the company was acquired by

eHelp Corporation Macromedia, Inc., was an American graphics, multimedia, and web development software company (1992–2005) headquartered in San Francisco, California, that made products such as Flash and Dreamweaver. It was purchased by its rival Adobe Syste ...

who owned a competing product called RoboDemo (now called

Adobe Captivate Adobe Captivate is an authoring tool that is used for creating eLearning content such as software demonstrations, software simulations, branched scenarios, and randomized quizzes in Shockwave Flash ( .swf, a.k.a. ‘Small Web Format’) and HTML ...

). eHelp Corporation released an updated version as CamStudio 2.1 under a

proprietary {{Short pages monitor