Is there a remote desktop application that supports recording?

Question

Problem

Recently I recorded a screen presentation with CamStudio to an avi file. The output was rather big (800 MB for about 45 min) and had some disadvantages like flickering colors and a too small sample rate for mouse movements.

Idea

I often work with Microsoft's Remote Desktop application and I wonder if it's possible to record the stream produced by this program to create a much smaller and much better screencast.

Question

Is there a remote desktop application that supports recording (and playback) of the stream?

Environment

Windows XP

Answer 1

RecordTS, from TSFactory, is a RDP client that can record the remote session. It exports them in AVI and SWF (Flash). It's not very cheap unfortunately.

You might want to look at ObserveIT too. The Xpress version is free.

Answer 2

TightVNC is supposed to able to record VNC sessions; however, not to a video file, but to a format only playable in the VNC viewer itself.

Answer 3

A question has been asked about recording desktop software here: http://superuser.com/questions/201/free-desktop-recording-screencasting-on-windows, look if some of them can record a region of a screen, so you can install it on the main computer and record the window where the remote desktop is showing,

Or simply by installing it on the remote computer (with full screen recording) and get the files from there later.

for the video output quality, this depend on what configuration / compression CODEC you are deploying.