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

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released as

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

. The software renders videos in an AVI format. It can also convert these AVIs into Flash Video format, embedded in SWF files. CamStudio is written in C++, 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 and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

product by RenderSoft software in October 2001. The

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

license was converted to the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

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

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. In 2003, the company was acquired by eHelp Corporation who owned a competing product called RoboDemo (now called Adobe Captivate). eHelp Corporation released an updated version as CamStudio 2.1 under a

proprietary {{Short pages monitor