ACA Screen Recorder
reviewed by John Schuster

Have you ever wanted to do any of the following:
1. Capture the great clip you see on YouTube?
2. Show someone how to do something (such as changing from XP Start Menu to Classic Start Menu)?
3. Create a tutorial of any other computer related issues?
Now you can do these things and without much trouble. Enter ACA Screen Recorder.
This program allows you the option of recording the entire screen, a specific window or a region (either a user defined region that can be moved and resized or a fixed region that cannot be moved or resized).
Also, you can include sound in the recording (Special note: Some, recent, laptop computers do not allow for this. To determine whether yours does, open the volume mixer, go to “Options”, click “Properties” and select “Recording.” If “Stereo Mix” is one of the options, then this will work. If not, you will not be able to record sound with this or any other such program, unless you purchase some other sort of sound solution. In researching this issue, I ran across rumors that the RIAA had a hand in this. These rumors are unproven.)
Sound defaults are: 22.05KHz, 16 bit stereo with MP3 compression at 7,000 Bytes/second.
Video compression is set to Automatic, by default, but there is a fairly long list of compressors from which to choose, if you are knowledgeable in such things.
You can choose where to save the resulting .avi files and how to name them. The default is to save them in the user’s “My Documents” folder and name them clip#### with the #### being sequential numbers. You can select the frame rate, with the default being 10 and you can choose to either record the mouse pointer or not.
Additionally, there are hot keys (you can change them) to Start/Stop the recording and to Pause/Resume the recording. This is very nice when you are recording the entire screen and don’t want the ACA Screen Recorder program showing up in your result.
It should be obvious that when you are creating your own tutorials, the quality of your audio will be only as good as the microphone and should be checked before you consider it to be a final version.
All files, created by ACA Screen Recorder, are saved in .AVI format and can be played back by many applications, including Windows Media Player and WinAmp.
I found this application very easy to use and will enjoy adding it to my collection of useful utilities.

ACA Screen Recorder is a product of ACA Systems
The registration price is: $29.95
Because they are located in the Peoples Republic of China, contact is via e-mail (see the Contact Us section of their web-site, http://www.acasystems.com)