I recently had to make a screen capture for embedding into a Keynote presentation. As this sort of thing isn’t something I do often I didn’t really want to pay money for a program to do it. Luckily, something totally unrelated happened and I found the solution. VLC, the open source media player was updated to version 1.0. It was one of those programs I had always had installed, but only ever used to play media files. As I was exploring the menus to see what was new, I discovered it was easy to be able to record your screen. Here are some instructions on how to do it.

First you’ll need to download and install VLC.

Open VLC and select File -> Streaming/Exporting Wizard…

A wizard appears. You will want to select Transcode/Save to file

Choose Select a stream. As we want to record the screen, in the input box enter screen://

Choose the format and the bitrate. As I’m using a Mac I’ll choose H.264 and select a suitable bit rate. If you have audio you wish to include you can select the audio option as well.

Select the method of encapsulation – for H.264 it’s good to select MPEG 4/MP4.

Select where to save your movie.

You’ll then be presented with a summary screen so you can check all the settings. If they are OK, click on Finish and VLC will start to record your screen (including the mouse movements).

Once you have finished recording, switch back to VLC and click the stop button. The recording will stop and the file is saved.

You will probably need to trim the start and the end of the screen capture in another program as the screen capture will record you switching back and forth between VLC to hit the stop button. For instance, if you are using the screen capture in a Keynote presentation you can import the movie into your presentation and then move the Start and Stop markers in the QuickTime inspector to remove these portions.

You’ll now have a beautifully created screen capture movie for your presentation. I hope you find this tip useful.

I just applied Apple security update 2007-004 to my powerbook (an ancient G3 Pismo running 10.3.9) & now when it wakes from sleep it doesn’t recognise my airport network. After a reboot it detects the network correctly, but once it goes to sleep again the airport network is lost. Turning the airport card on and off again does nothing, the only thing that resolves the issue is a reboot.If you are running 10.3.9, just be aware of what might happen when you install this update. It’s not a show stopper, but just really inconvenient.Update: 2007-05-02 Apple just released security update 2007-004 v1.1 and that seems to have fixed the problem.