The first thing you have to do is decide on what software you’ll want to use. If you want to start out with some free solutions, you can use my CamStudio (Internet Marketing Edition). I’ve used it successfully on Windows 2000 and XP. Users have reported that it does work with Vista.

Here’s a MS Vista fix that might work for you:
Create a shortcut.
Right click on the application shortcut.
Then select compatibility.
Then choose run compatibility with Windows XP SP2.

A very popular program for video screen captures is Camtasia by a company called Techsmith. It goes for $300, so you might want to play around with the free solutions first.

Going back to CamStudio, I’ve had good luck with it in the past. If you have any issues with audio going out of sync, you might want to try setting the MCI option in the audio settings. You can find more information about the non-Internet Marketing Edition on the Camstudio website.

Another issue that I had with Camstudio was that it doesn’t compress the audio as well as Camtasia does. So I ended up using another free tool to process the video and audio. This tool was called Super Encoder. It allows you to compress to many formats including FLV, SWF, AVI, MOV, MPEG (1,2, & 4) and more.

Updated 12/30/2008

Sometimes the Super encoder can’t be downloaded depending on your browser. The creator of Super has to fix his site up. Here’s an alternative called Riva encoder. It’s only for FLV’s, but it’s simple to use.

Screen Video Capture Alternatives

Wink – Another popular free alternative with nice features
Krut – Multi-platform and use it with Super Encoder
VHSC Video Capture Card Emulator – For the techies – you can use just about any video capturing software with this free tool.

Adding Video to Your Wordpress Membership Site

Tip: You can add FLV video files to your membership site using the plug (included with FASTmember) called Anarchy Media Player. Find out more by clicking here.

Updated 12/30/2008

I’ve been having issues with the Anarchy plugin with recent versions of Wordpress. Lately I’ve been using FLV Embed.

If you have the visual editor disabled, you’ll see a button that says “Embed Players”. Click on the button and enter the path of your video file. The appropriate code will be entered into your post.

Affordable Video Hosting

For this site, I’m using a file sharing host to serve up my videos. The reason why I decided to do this is because of bandwidth. Streaming video takes up tons of bandwidth…and my video host has unlimited bandwidth:)

So I categorize the videos as “Private” in my Tradebit file sharing account, grab the link, and have it stream through FLV Embed.

Updated: 11/17/2008

I currently use my Dreamhost account for videos that I stream through FLV Embed. Dreamhost offers tons of bandwidth and disk space. I also use them for my other media…but not so much for my blogs; That’s because their databases are pretty slow.

Click to Download (Simple Sales Copy)

Here’s a quick video tutorial on how to use this software.

I created a membership site mostly using audio. I then exported the files as low-bitrate MP3’s (64kbs). To do this, you’ll want to download the free LAME mp3 encoder. You can find out more about LAME on this Audacity web page.

Using Audio Files in Wordpress

There are 3 ways you can do this: include downloads, have streaming audio, or both (preferred).

There are many Wordpress plugins that allow you to stream audio. I like using the Anarchy Media Player which is included with your FASTmember installation archive.