Screencastify is a simple video screen capture software for Chrome.
Screencastify is a simple video screen capture software (aka. screencast recorder) for Chrome. It is able to record all screen activity inside a tab, including audio. Just press record and the content of your tab is recorded. So you can easily create a screencast for video tutorials, record presentations etc. It also supports desktop capturing, allowing you to record anything on your screen (not just tabs).
Videos are recorded as webm/vp8 files with ogg vorbis audio and can be saved to disk or uploaded to Youtube or Google Drive with a single click.
Screencastify does not depend on any external software (like Java, Flash or other plugins). So it also runs on Chromebooks and Chromeboxes.
Video recording happens completely locally. So your recordings are not transferred to any remote system unless you choose to upload them. Your video files are stored on a sandboxed local HTML5 file system managed by Chrome. When choose to store your recordings on Google Drive, they are uploaded to your Google Drive account after recording and removed from local storage. This helps to save local storage space, especially on Chromebooks and allows access your recordings from other devices.
Keyboard shortcuts can be configured in the Options.
The free version allows to record videos that are 10 minutes long. To record longer videos, it can be upgraded to a paid version (see https://www.screencastify.com/buy for details).
Please report any issues you might experience using the integrated bug report tool.
About extension permissions:
On installation, you'll be warned that the permissions Screeencastify requests, allowing it to:
- Access your data on all websites:
This is triggered by the tabCapture API, that Screencastify uses to record tabs. See here (http://goo.gl/hLR4f8) for a discussion.
It's also triggered by the host permission for <all_urls>. This is required to draw the mouse pointer inside the tab (via a injected content script) while recording.
- Access your tabs and browsing activity:
Triggered by the webNavigation API that Screeencastify uses to detect navigation and re-draw the mouse pointer on new pages while recording.
Also triggered by the tabs API that is used to detect when a tab becomes inactive. This way Screencastify can warn you when you're recording a tab that is not in the foreground any more.
- Capture content of your screen (only on Chrome Beta):
Triggered by the desktopCapture API, this only covers desktop recording (not tab recording) so far and only on the Chrome Beta or Dev channels.
If you want to dive deep, take a look at the official extension API documentation (http://goo.gl/8eerN5) that explains how API permissions map to install-time warnings.
Please be aware that the warnings are designed to warn you what the extension could do which such permissions, not what it actually does (http://goo.gl/14S1q8). Screencastify does not do anything malicious, in fact it does not do anything at all while not in use. It unloads itself to save resources and just waits for clicks on the extension icon or keyboard shortcuts. (Can be verified by activating the developer mode on chrome://extensions and inspecting its view and the absence of its content-scripts on any page while not recording).
Changelog:
moved to https://google.com/+ScreencastifyChrome
