Capturing screenshots under Windows is fairly easy. Hit the PrintScreen button to capture your entire desktop or Alt-PrintScreen to capture the currently selected Window to the clipboard, and then Ctrl V to paste the captured image while using your favorite image editing program.

But if you’ve ever needed to capture screenshots or video from a 3D application (like a game), nothing Windows offers can reliably do the trick. Taksi is perhaps the best open-source tool to meet all your screen and video capture needs. And it does so using any CODEC installed on your computer.

A quick lesson on CODECs. The acronym CODEC stands for COmpress DECompress and it’s any device or software program that can encode and decode a video stream. Why is this important? If you were to capture a video signal in an unencoded manner, you would capture every single frame of the video signal in its entirety. This would not only require a high level or horsepower, but the storage requirements for even a few minutes of video is immense. There are professional and pro-sumer solutions that allow you to do this, but the cost would break most people’s budgets.

A CODEC solves this storage problem by analyzing the differences between one video frame and next then stores only the data that makes up that difference. There are also some other techniques that reduce the fidelity of the video signal, but this is essentially how a CODEC works. Not all CODECs are equal. Some are better at prepping video for web-streaming, and others are better for preparing video footage for DVD authoring.

Many  CODECs work entirely using software, including DiVX, Mpeg 2, and Indeo, which allows the video to be played on any computer that has the CODEC installed. Other CODECs require the presence of hardware, such as those found on some video capture cards like TrueVision, Matrox and Avid, and these video sequences can usually be played only on computers with the hardware installed.

End of lesson.

There are several packages that allow you capture video footage right from your desktop, but do so using a CODEC that only that software can use. For example, Fraps is a popular package, but if you were to capture video using Fraps, the video file could only be played on another computer that has Fraps installed.

Taksi, on the other hand, allows you to capture video from your desktop using any of the CODECs already installed on your computer, including Video for Windows, DiVX, XViD and Mpeg4. And on top of all that it’s open source.

The only downside is Taksi doesn’t capture audio. And it’s currently only available for Windows users.

Taksi is a favorite in our labs and the quality of the video always meets our needs. You can read more about Taksi by clicking here. You can also download a free package containing the current versions of the most popular CODECs from www.free-codecs.com by clicking here.

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