FireFox Addon: Make ScreenCasts In FireFox With Capture Fox

If you do not know what screencasts are, they are a recording of what happens on your computer screen. They usually serve as demos or guides for to let the audience know exactly how a particular computer process functions. Nowadays screencasts are accompanied by the audio from a developer or site creator, who talks you through the process while showing it all to you. Creating such screencasts is not easy if you do not entirely know what you are doing. The internet currently has quite a number of programs available that let you record your screen but none of them are as simple as the one we will be exploring today – Capture Fox.

Capture Fox is a free add-on for the Firefox browser that lets you record either your whole screen or just the webpage currently open in Firefox. Despite its minuscule size, the add-on provides amazing functionality. Before you start the actual recording, it would be best to select access the add-on’s options in the Tools menu of Firefox:

By default the Basic Settings tab is opened. Here you will select whether to record the entire screen or just the Firefox Window. You can select video quality from Low, Moderate, and High. FPS (frame per second) can also be selected from 1-5 fps. If your screencast does not require any audio, you leave the Voice Recording checkbox unchecked, keeping the size of your resultant recording low. It is also in this tab that you select the output folder of the video.

In the Advanced Settings tab you choose you the video codec (either JPEG or XVID) and audio codec (WAV or MP3). You can also assign what your output file be named.

Once you have adjusted the add-on’s settings according to your needs and are ready to record, click on the Start Capturing button to initiate recording. To stop recording simply click on the Capture Fox icon in the bottom right of the browser:

Once you are done with a recording, you can this same icon to start new recordings.

The format of the output file is AVI and if the XVID-MP3 combination is used, the output file size is of a very small size (which can conveniently be uploaded to a website).

Capture Fox is a must-have for all bloggers and reviewers – it makes creating screencasts unprecedentedly easy.