Screen recording without third-party software on Windows 7?

Is there a way to do screen recording on Windows 7 without installing third-party software? (Doing it with Microsoft software would be okay.)

Specifically, I'd like to be able to run a program and generate a video file (for example, .avi) of the session. These would be short 30 second or so clips.

Answer

The closest thing I can think of is Problem Steps Recorder.

You can access it by clicking the Start button and typing "psr.exe" and hitting enter.

This tool will record each mouse-click and save it as an image, then compile everything into HTML (more specifically, a Microsoft MHT file). However this is not a video capture tool. As far as I know, there isn't one built-in to Windows.

You may look into downloading the free VLC player. With VLC, you can use your desktop as a capture device:

1. Click Media


2. Click Open Capture Device


3. Choose Capture Mode: Desktop (at this point, you may want to set a higher FPS)

..and then stream it to a file:

4. Click the arrow icon to the right of play, and click "Stream"


5. Leave the default "Source: screen://" and click "Next"


6. Select "File" in the dropdown and click "Add"


7. Choose a filename then click "Next"


8. Choose your encoding and then click "Next"


9. Click "Stream"

Hope this helps.