I have my own screencasting needs covered (thanks to winning a Camtasia license here on DC
), but I see one scenario related to screencasting that is not properly covered with current products:
When a user of my software has a problem or a question, I would love to see a short screencast of the problem occurring instead of vague textual description (missing crucial context) in an email. The problem is the difficulty of creating a screencast - installing a new software, learning how to use it, selecting area for recording, configuring audio recording, choosing (or even installing) proper video codec, uploading the video somewhere, emailing me with a link... That is too much work, some of on the choices are non-trivial and require specific knowledge. It is certainly harder than writing an email...
A related use case involves a user that would like to create a video tutorial for my software, but does not want to invest too much time.
I believe many other developers would be grateful if their users had an easy way to record screencasts and share them. I even started working on something like this, but soon gave it up, because it was too far away from my core business and seemed not exactly trivial. My plan was to have 1 or 2 buttons in the status bar of my application ("Start recording" or "Pause recording"+"End recording"). Start recording would show a window with understandable options like "record audio" and "record from webcam and place it in the corner". End recording would show a window allowing the user to name and describe the video and save it to file, upload it to youtube or to my web server, or send the video via email. I was planning to incorporate Google's open source VP8 codec and nothing else. The recording would always contain just the active window scaled to 1280x720 pixels (keeping pixel aspect ratio). In short, as few options as possible during the whole process.
If the screenshot captor with screencasting would somehow make this use case practical, that would be great. Alternatively, if you decided to sell licenses for a screencast-recording library, that would make it easy for developers to implement features I described above, that may become a popular thing as well - but it would need some research.
