Mac OS X is full of ways to record your screen, with a tool built in to Quicktime Player and a vast number of third-party apps. Among the many tools, Screenflow is easily our top choice. It’s fast, feature-rich, handles everything about the screencasting process from start to finish, and doubles as possibly the best simple video-editing application on the Mac.
There are plenty of apps that will stream your home video collection from your computer to your Android phone, and there are other apps that will convert on the fly for you before it’s streamed, but not too many apps do both at the same time and do it well enough that you can actually watch your video in the process. For that, we think Plex is the best video streaming and live conversion app for the job.
With only two main options for video streaming and live conversions apps for the iPhone, it’s a tough choice. After much consideration, we believe Air Video is your best option thanks to its simple setup, great video quality and general reliability.
Dear Lifehacker, I’ve heard of (and even sometimes used) video players like VLC when Windows Media Play prompts me to download “new codecs”, but I’ve also heard people talk about codec packs like K-Lite, Shark007 and CCCP. What exactly are these codec packs and what do they do? Are they better than just using something like VLC, and if so, which one should I use?
If you’ve ever wanted to share the best parts of a YouTube video and not the whole thing, Snipreel allows you take small snippets of a video and share your own highlight reel.
Mac: Camtasia Studio is one of our favourite screencasting tools, and TechSmith, the company behind the app, updated the Mac version today to version 2.0, which includes new annotations for your screencasts and videos, blur effects so you can obscure sensitive information, visual effects to add some interest, and more.
Chrome, Firefox and Safari: Related videos! They’re useful but can often have misleading thumbnails or text, designed to get you to click when you have no actual interest in the video content. It’d be nice to see the ratio of likes to dislikes on the video before you go in, right? Now you can.
Unfortunately, there’s a serious lack of video-recording applications for Android that build on the features of the stock app. Perhaps its because there are so many devices with so many different cameras, or perhaps its because the stock camcorder app does things so well. In any event, we found that the stock camcorder app offered the most control over the camera and got the job done with the least hassle or setup.
The iPhone’s built-in camera app is pretty good, but if you want to add a few more features you have to head to the app store. Out of the handful of options available we think the most solid upgrade is Video Camera+ for its flexibility and useful feature set.
iOS: Vimessa is a new video-sharing service that lets you record and share HD videos from your iPhone to your friends anywhere in the world for free, regardless of whether they also use the app. If your friends do use the app, they can view your videos almost instantly, as you’re uploading.
