Best Screencasting Tool That You’re Not Using At All

Are you looking for a screencasting tool for Windows that doesn’t cost a dime but can still help you create high-quality screencast videos? Read on.

Microsoft Expression Encoder is essentially seen as a tool for developers to encode video files for the web with Silverlight. What you may not know, however, is that Expression Encoder comes with an impressive video screen capture application that is quite easy-to-use and offers more features than most other free screencasting solutions.

The program, known as Expression Encoder Screen Capture, is easy to learn and master and it won’t bore you with any of the technical jargon that is associated with video encoding.

To get started, simply select the area of the desktop screen that wish to capture as a video. The application has built-in presets for standard capture sizes, like 1280x720 for 720p or 1920x1080 for 1080p, or you may drag the red boundary to manually select an area. You can also perform full screen captures with Expression Encoder.

The default frame-rate for video screen captures is 15 fps but you can increase it to 30 or even 60 fps if you are recording, say, a video game walkthrough or even Google Earth.

You can toggle the microphone icon on the recording toolbar to add audio narration to the screen recording. Expression Encoder also supports “Picture in Picture” style video recording with your web camera, a feature that you are less likely to find in most other free screencasting tools.

Once you’re done with the recording, it’s time to edit and publish the video.

Expression Encoder offers a basic set of editing tools to help you fine-tune the recording. For instance, you may trim the boring parts or you can import external video clips and images (like an intro) to merge them with the main screencast.

If you would like to brand your screencast video with your own logo, just choose the “overlay” option and pick a location over the video where you want to place the logo. There’s support for sub-titles as well in case you would like to produce accessible screencasts.

The free version of Expression Encoder will let you publish screencast videos in Windows Media format and the maximum length of individual video screen captures is 10 minutes. The software supports Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

To give you an example, the above screencast video was recorded and produced with Expression Encoder. See more on screencasting software and online screencasting apps.

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Print Files from Mobile Phone using Dropbox

Here’s a tip that will let you print documents, emails, photos, PDF files, etc. from a mobile phone to your existing printer.

All you need is a printer connected to the computer and a mobile device for sending print jobs – it could be a BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad, Android or any other web-enabled phone.

Wirelessly Print Anything from Anywhere, Anytime

While mobile phones have become a lot more capable in the past few years, the connection between the printer and your phone is still very weak.

For instance, if you are using a BlackBerry or an iPhone, how do you print any of the presentations or spreadsheets that you have as email attachments? Or if you are viewing driving directions on Google Maps using an iPad, how do you send that map to the printer?

Your phone’s app store will have a few printing apps to let you wirelessly print files but if you want to save a few bucks, you can simply use Dropbox to print documents from your phone to any printer without requiring any additional software.

Some upcoming printers will have built-in support for mobile printing via email but with Dropbox, you get the same feature without requiring any new hardware.

Before we get into the details, watch the video above as it shows how printing from a mobile phone actually works through Dropbox (apologies for the bad audio quality).

Print Files from any Mobile Phone through Dropbox

The workflow is like this. You download a small utility on your computer that runs in the background and constantly monitors one of your Dropbox folders for any new printing jobs.

You can send files for printing from your mobile phone through email or using any of the Dropbox mobile apps. As soon as Dropbox downloads the file locally, the utility will send it to the default printer. Once the file is printed, it gets archived to the logs folder.

To get this thing running on your computer, please follow these easy steps:

Step 1: Make sure that you have Dropbox on the computer that is connected to the printer.

Step 2: To send print jobs from your mobile device to the printer, you have two options.

You can download a Dropbox app on your mobile phone -- they have apps for BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad, Nokia, webOS (Palm), and Android based phones. Alternatively, you can send files from your mobile phone to Dropbox using email. Just connect your Dropbox account with Habilis and they’ll give you a unique email address – any files or attachments sent to this address will automatically appear in your Dropbox folder.

Step 3: Download this zip file* and double-click the eprint.vbs file (see the source code). The script will create a sub-folder inside your main Dropbox folder called PrintQueue where all the mobile print jobs will queue up and another sub-folder called logs where all the completed jobs will be archived.

[*] VBS scripts are Windows-only but there are workarounds for Mac OS X and Linux as well.

Step 4: You are now all set to print files from our mobile phone. Just send a test file from your mobile phone to that secret email address, or upload it through the Dropbox mobile app, and your printer will turn it into a hard copy almost instantly.

The utility can also handle multiple files in one go and it should print almost all file formats for which you have an associated application on the computer. If you would like to shut down the eprint utility, launch Windows task manager and end the “wscript.exe” process from the list.

If you have trouble running the above script on your computer, there’s a chance that you may have associated the file with Notepad or some other text editor. Press shift and right click the file in Windows Explore and choose “Windows Based Script Host” under Open With. Alternatively, open the command prompt, type “cscript eprint.vbs” and hit enter.

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