I am a die-hard Chrome fanatic and anyone else who has used Google Chrome knows exactly what I am talking about. Chrome is undeniably fast and has some other great features to boot. Still, one shortcoming that Chrome has is the inability to develop and add plug-ins, a vital part of the browsing experience for most of us bloggers and web people alike. This is the one of the only reasons I keep the open source love child Firefox on my desktop, and it is plug-ins like Capture Fox that keep me around.
I don’t have a lot of money and my future posts for Techgeist will involve screencasts of private beta products. There were a few options out in the wild that were free, but they hardly worked correctly and the ones that did work costed a good sum of money. After running some Google searches I came across Capture Fox and have been using it ever since.
The program is very basic to use, simply click the screen sharing button at the bottom right-hand corner of the Firefox browser and a menu like the one above will appear. Capture Fox is very limited at what it can do but it can get the job done (the options are limited to what is shown above). All files are saved in .AVI format, which means that longer screen captures will result in very large file sizes, but the .AVI file type is immediatly ready to upload to Youtube which means you don’t have to worry about converting formats. All in all Capture Fox does a good job but there exists one major issue. Lag.
There are many times when using Capture Fox that my actions would lag behind my speech. While this doesn’t always happen, it is no doubt annoying when doing a particularly long screencast and finding out that the sound and video were not merged correctly. There are also some reports that Capture Fox crashes PC’s on Vista machines, but from my experience running the plug-in on XP is fine. Capture Fox is also limited to the windows platform, a definite bummer for Mac users.
All in all though, Capture Fox is an excellent tool that is great for doing quick and non-vital screencasts. If you wish to download the plug-in go here and tell me what you think in the comments.
