Screencast-O-Matic

Screencast-O-Matic is an intuitive application that enables users to record audio and video stream to publish the resulting clip on YouTube. It integrates many useful functions and lets you save the videos to file on the HDD as well.

At startup you can move the frame to any position on the screen before starting the recording session. Once you stop it, you can either publish the video to Screencast-O-Matic or YouTube, or just export it to a file on the computer.

The YouTube-publishing module lets you choose a title, description, tags, category, privacy setting, captions and side bars. Plus, you can hide the mouse cursor, clicks and halo, as well as remove the audio stream or webcam.

If you create a video file on the computer instead, you can pick the format between MP4, AVI, FLV and GIF, together with the size (full - 640x480, HD - 1280x720,  or rescale width in pixels), as well as set up the options we have mentioned at the YouTube profile.

Screencast-O-Matic needs low-to-moderate system resources, has a good response time and works well. It delivers very good image and sound quality, but the videos do not smoothly (at an excellent level).

On the other hand, the application takes a pretty long time to save a clip to file, and the resulted videos have a large size. For example, Screencast-O-Matic saved a 1-minute AVI clip with an 8.32MB size at a 640x480 resolution, and 12.7MB at HD size respectively. Nevertheless, Screencast-O-Matic offers a straightforward approach to record videos for YouTube in a user-friendly environment.