Ultra-fast animated screen capture with LICEcap or ScreenToGif

Up until now I was using fabulous ScreenToGif to quickly capture animated screenshots for bug reporting. It truly is — as its homepage says — free, compact and powerful. It comes with handy installer, but also with portable version. And capturing is ultra-easy with it.

Today I discovered LICECap and immediately felt in love again…

ScreenToGif

https://www.screentogif.com/

It allows you to:

  1. Capture a screen region, active window or whole screen
  2. Record yourself from the webcam or making a drawing on a virtual whiteboard. With or without sound
  3. Configure recording process using a dozens of configuration switches and parameters
  4. Run playback, review your recording, edit it, add image or transition effects
  5. Save recording in many, many formats (including video) and watch recording stats

And believe me or not, you can do many more things. And that’s the biggest problem about ScreenToGif.

Because the above makes it much more like a free, yet powerful video grabber and editor. With all these switches, parameters and clicks necessary to start your recording and then save it might be overwhelming for many and in many scenarios.

And for ultra-fast screen grabbing for bug reporting it is simply too big.

LICEcap

https://www.cockos.com/licecap/

This piece of software doesn’t have even 10% of what ScreenToGif offers. It:

  • Records region only
  • Saves images to GIF format only
  • Has FPS and capture size as the only option

This causes that animated screen capturing process becomes moron-level easy:

  1. Run program
  2. Select capture region
  3. Hit the Record… button
  4. Pick destination .gif file
  5. Wait two seconds
  6. Record animation
  7. Hit the Stop button

And you’re done. Screen is capture to selected .gif file, ready to be uploaded or attached somewhere.

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