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Live Screen capture with Camtasia and Flashcom
by Brajeshwar

All the way long, I had been thinking that Camtasia Studio Recorder can output only a max of 320 x 240 res. But I am wrong, now you can broadcast whatever dimension you wish. As there is no easy way to do an app sharing or a desktop sharing directly with Macromedia Flash Communication Server MX 1.0 (or indeed 1.5 - ed.), Camtasia Studio comes to the rescue with its live record output feature.

First you may download the file (I was playing with) so that you can skip everything and start playing.

Steps :
(a) create a video object on your stage and size it to 640 x 480, give an instance name of say "camtasia_mc".
(b) add the following frame script

//let us get the Camtasia Studio Video Capture Driver
//you may throw up an array of camera source available and
//let the user choose from them
//for this, we know what we are doing, so let us get it
for (i = 0; i < camera.names.length; i++) {
   if (camera.names[i] == "Camtasia Studio Video Capture Driver") {
   break;
   }
}
// Get the camera
mycamera = camera.get(i);
mycamera.setMode(640, 480, 5, true);
mycamera.setQuality(0, 50);
//show the live output
camtasia_mc.attachVideo(mycamera);

(c) start live recorder and remember to set the video format to 640 x 480
(d) run your Flash document.

There you see your live feed coming out in the Flash document.
This same technique cam be used for any camera source, like a TV Tuner card which can in turn broadcast a TV channel live using Flashcom Server.

External link: Camtasia Studio

Got a question about this tutorial? You can find the thread for it in our Flashcom Forum.

Brajeshwar 03/2003