Stepok Development

There are many users wrote mail to ask us adding a feature that recording sound from speaker. And we have to reply them one by one.

This issue is not a problem at all because SCREEN2EXE or other sound recording applications are recording ‘default sound inputting channel, which for most case is microphone.

So this is an issue about how to set the ‘sound inputting channel’ in system. So it is not part of the software can do, but related.

First of all, you should know some basic knowledge about windows sound mixer. The Windows sound mixer which you can set in ‘Control Panel’ of system, include 2 pages. 1 for speaker output called settings of playing, and 2 for sound inputting called settings for recording.

To record speaker sound, simply set input source by check it to channel ‘Stereo Mixer’ which means the sound sending to the speaker. On your computer, it may be other similar name, which depends on your sound card. Anyway, ‘mixer’ means mix sound up and sending to speaker.

But, bad news to tell you that some sound card just not support ‘mixer’ as inputting. That means forget it, you can not record speaker sound, change to another computer please….

Now we know how to record speaker sound, can we record speaker sound with microphone together? Sure you can! Check both speaker mixer channel and microphone channel…wait a moment, seems I CAN NOT do this?! The system doesn’t allow me to check on 2 or more channels in inputting page.

You are right; the system can not record 2 channels at same time. But there is still a way to do this. Switch to ‘speaker output’ page, and this page allows you play sound from multiple channels at same time, (that’s what mixer do). Then you can check microphone channel to make the microphone inputting played though speaker, mixed with the original speaker sound. And then record ‘mixer’ as sound source. Now, problem solved, you can record both of them. To be noticed, in default , microphone channel does not appear in ‘speaker’ page, you can set it in the property page where you switch between ‘speaker’ page and ‘inputting’ page.

A demo movie show the above steps,

In the new v3.0 SCREEN2EXE/SCREEN2SWF, a new function called ‘Audio re-dub’ is introduced in editing. This article will tell you why add this function and how it can help us adding/replacing the sound of a program.

The original idea of this function is coming from a very common issue that, when recording a tutorial with sound, it needs operating on computer while making speech at same time. Most people can not focus on both of them, so they either make mistake in sound or in operation. And have to record again and again… painful, isn’t it?

What if we split the recording into 2 steps?

Step 1, focus on recording on-screen part. And maybe you can record a reference sound too, it maybe not good enough for final using, but can help you catch the right beat.

Step 2, give sound to the recorded movie. In this step, focus on recording sound.

Obviously, That is easier now, right? So we developed this ‘Re-dub’ function. When clicking on ‘Start Re-dub’, the preview will start, and recording start too. It will play while recording sound until the movie end. Then the new sound track will replace the precious.

This function is also useful to:

1, Add sound to projects, which are recorded before without sound.

2, Translate the sound part to another language.

3, Editing the sound, replace it with a new one.

Although SCREEN2SWF is designed to recording minutes level short tutorials, but it still support video over hours in theory.

Some users report that SCREEN2SWF dead after, for example, half hour or 1 hour, recording. And we spend some time to find what’s wrong and turns out to find no error in their.

The reason the users feel no response is, SCREEN2SWF will process a ‘parsing’ work after recording to build an index table for editing. This will take several seconds if the video is not too long. But when the video is over 1 hour, this process could take over 1 minute to go. And during it, user can not click on any button, looks like dead in interface. Look carefully, the progress bar are still running until parsing over.

The new released v2.8 SCREEN2SWF/SCREEN2EXE adds new features to support full-screen replay. It is a very useful feature for demonstration.

For SWF format, click on ‘Setup’ button of ‘Save Page’, the last step, you will see 2 new options as following,

Check/Uncheck each  of them can enable/disable the full-screen and information button of flash program. If you will insert this SWF file into HTML manually, please notice that, ‘allowFullScreen’ property of the object MUST be true, like this,

<OBJECT classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,124,0" width=600 height=460>

<param name= "Movie" value="a.swf">
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true">
<embed src="a.swf" width="600" height="460" loop="0"
quality="high" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" menu="false" allowFullScreen="true">
</embed></OBJECT>

Self-play exe movie has full-screen button too, and viewer can click to switch to full screen, and press ‘ESC’ to back to normal status.

Some users complain that the quality of movie is not good, and send us samples. We find that it is the reason is same, that they have not disabled their desktop wallpaper before recording.

Our recorder based on an optimized compressing algorithm will check the contents of recording. If a photo, image is find on most area, it will adaptively choose a lossy compression way to process it instead of lossless for buttons, icons and menu… So, the quality drops.

Wallpaper is not necessary but costs more file size when illustrating something to others. We recommend disabling it before recording for 2 reasons. First, the quality improves a lot. Second, the smaller output file.

Here is a comparison between use wallpaper and not.

Left, with wallpaper, 130K                Right, without wallpaper, 20K

[SCREEN2SWF]

Some users asked us, is that possible to license SCREEN2SWF on flash disk? The reason they need install a screen recorder on a flash disk is, when they use public computer, they may need to record something they need.

The answer is no, unfortunately, for SCREEN2SWF. Because there will be license problem to do this, and there will be ‘can not run’ problem too when install it on a removable drive. But, there is a way to do it!

As you know, SCREEN2EXE is totally free software and we allow you use it for any purpose and install on any numbers of computers/devices. And it works well on a USB flash disk. So, it is possible to install a SCREEN2EXE on flash drive and share project file with SCREEN2SWF on a registered computer. Let me show you how to do it.

First, install SCREEN2EXE to a local folder. Then, copy the following files and folder on flash drive (you need to create a folder manually). Now you have a portable screen recorder that supports ‘plug and record’ on any computer.

After that you can uninstall the local SCREEN2EXE copy.

Next, you can connect flash disk to any computer, run SCREEN2EXE manually to record… But, remember to save the result to a project file (*.svp) instead of exe. And, please ignore the email dialog in first running; don’t leave your personal information on other computers.

Final step, when you come back to your computer where SCREEN2SWF is installed and registered. You open the project file to get everything you recorded. You can continue editing it and exporting it to any format you need. Easy, isn’t it?

We have updated the looking of annotation object in both SCREEN2EXE and SCREEN2SWF. Annotation is a very useful tool for a screen recorder to show visitors what happens now. Let’s compare the old version and current:

Change the color, font and transparent you can create more variants.

You can update your old *.svp projects by loading them, select each annotation object, and make some changing( to update the image ) in this new version.

[SCREEN2SWF/EXE]