I would never trust important data to long term storage on any burned optical disc. The problem is that nobody really knows how quickly the organic dye used will last. We're only now getting an understanding of how quickly the dye on DVD recordables degrades. For BD it's still an almost complete unknown. The manufacturers make claims but those are theoretical and as we're finding out with DVD they should be taken with a huge grain of salt.

If you're going to go that direction my recommendation would be to find 2 different types of disc that use different dyes and make duplicate copies of everything. Of course you would also probably need to test at least a couple samples of each every 6 months or so if you want to be safe.

As I understand it hard drives have a slightly different problem in theory. Supposedly it's not good for the lubricant used for the spindles if they don't spin up regularly. Having said that, I've had hard drives sit for a couple years and then go back into full time use without any problem. I don't think I've ever put one away that was working and then have it fail when I took it back out.

My name is Rich Fiscus and I write and create videos for AfterDawn.com. In my former life I was an IT monkey and for a couple years I taught community college networking classes. I found DonationCoder more than a year ago when I was looking for a launcher to alleviate my headaches with the Windows 7 [strike]Stop[/strike] Start menu. Now I'm hoping to give something back by contributing to the community and doing a little promotion for some of my favorite software.

I decided to try this program out as a more barebones alternative to CamStudio. I actually do a lot of screencasting but I don't need anything special like annotations. I am, however intrigued by some of the options in this program and after skimming through this thread I think I could help out if you're still working on it. I have a lot of experience with video encoding, a decent familiarity with the ffmpeg command line and AviSynth has been my go to video editing tool for close to a decade now.

Since I'm in the middle of a wipe and clean install of my system drive I'll have to wait to try the program out, but I already have a couple questions and comments so I figured I'd get a head start here. I guess the first thing would be just to say I'm a big fan of your software already. After more than a year of playing around with LaunchBar Commander off and on I'm making it the center piece of some articles for the website I work for (AfterDawn.com btw) which will also include some videos for our YouTube channel. You can expect a donation from me on the strength of Screenshot Captor alone once I have a few bucks to spare.

But back to Easy Screencast Recorder, one of the things that caught my attention was the option to create MKV files but I'm not quite clear on what I need to have installed for that. It says the "MKV codec" is required but since Matroska is a container and not a compression standard there's no such thing. What it does need is a MKV muxer. I'm guessing you're using DirectShow and I'm guessing (or hoping at least) this uses the Dshow muxer from MPC-HC. If there's more information in the help manual feel free to just tell me to RTFM. My computer doesn't want to open CHM files right now (I did say I was reinstalling Windows) so I can't check for myself right now.

On the subject of codecs, though, for anyone encoding normal screen activity (ie standard low motion computer use) I would highly recommend the CamStudio Lossless codec. For ultra low motion video it's more efficient than any other realtime codec by a couple orders of magnitude. For anything else it's pretty much worthless since it drops frames left and right.

Also, if you're still thinking about some way to incorporate AviSynth functionality you don't necessarily need to have it installed. You should be able to do everything you need by just linking to avisynth.dll. I wouldn't want to guess how much work that might be since I'm not a programmer but you should be able to get any answers you need at the Doom9 forums.