Once the 30 days are up, will I have to upgrade to a standard license to keep using this software? Or can I continue recording after 30 days? It just sounds fishy to me.

It’s Total Freeware and it’s main purpose is for creating tutorial related or “How To” videos.

Works in Windows and Linux.

http://debugmode.com/wink/

Introducing Wink…

Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users.
Here is a sample Flash tutorial created by Wink. Click the green arrow button to start viewing it. ——–>
(More tutorials created by Wink users and companies can be found at the User Forums.)

This is a good example of how you can create tutorials in Wink, by capturing screenshots, mouse movements and specifying your own explanations with them. And all this in a standard Windows-based UI with drag-and-drop editing makes it very easy to create high quality tutorials/documentation.

It is estimated that Macromedia Flash Player is installed in more than 90% of the PCs. Using Wink you can create content viewable across the web in all these users’ desktops. Similar applications sell for hundreds of dollars, while Wink is free with unrivaled features. So spread the word about Wink to your friends.

Sample: Click the green button to play

Features

Freeware: Distributed as freeware for business or personal use. However if you want to redistribute Wink, you need to get permission from the author.
Cross-Platform: Available for all flavours of Windows and various versions of Linux (x86 only).
Audio: Record voice as you create the tutorial for explaining better.
Input formats: Capture screenshots from your PC, or use images in BMP/JPG/PNG/TIFF/GIF formats.
Output formats: Macromedia Flash, Standalone EXE, PDF, PostScript, HTML or any of the above image formats. Use Flash/html for the web, EXE for distributing to PC users and PDF for printable manuals.
Multilingual support: Works in English, French, German, Italian, Danish, Spanish, Serbian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified/Traditional Chinese.
Smart Capture Tools: Capture screenshots automatically as you use your PC, based on mouse and keyboard input (great time saver and generates professional captures).
Performance/Quality: Creates highly compressed Flash presentations (few kbs to few hundreds of kbs, much smaller than competing commercial products) ideal for using on the web.

Tools:
Navigation buttons to move to next/previous/random frames in the presentation, you can use custom bitmaps for these buttons (full transparency/alpha channel support).
Callouts and shapes for displaying text explanations. The inbuilt Callout Editor is used to create custom shaped callouts as you want.
Intuitive drag-n-drop editing of the frame, callout, cursor, navigation buttons and the title elements.
Advanced features like templates, cursor editing, palettes, background images, control bars & preloaders for the flash output etc.
Completely PC and Web ready with exports to PDF, HTML, SWF and EXE formats.
Innovative compression techniques applied to reduce filesize of output Flash file. Generated flash file plays in Flash players from version 3 and above, giving you widest array of target audience.
Uncompressed output to allow you import the output of Wink into other Flash editors.

Kelvin

I didn’t look during install, either, to see if installation of ffdshow can be disabled. It shouldn’t install it by default. ffdshow gets updated quite frequently.

You’re right, most people probably don’t care about the capture method used.

Sorry I cant give more value added feedback than that.

1) Inability to chose the capture codec
2) Lack of explanation of what, exactly, the compression level setting indicates and how it affects performance.
3) Lack of ability to disable capturing the mouse pointer.
4) It interferes with ffdshow, especially the HuffYUV format.

This makes it less than ideal for pristine captures which are my need.

UltraScreenRecorder, a modified version of CamStudio, also has DirectShow integration including sound but the cursor options of CamStudio are not available. VH Scrren Capture Codec gives DirectShow access but needs a capture program (VirtualDub or something similar.)

Personally, I’d give this an 8 for effort but there are some major issues that need to be fixed. Corrupting ffdshow, even when FlashbackExpress is NOT in use indicates a very poorly constructed set of hooks. Not good.