What Portable Screen Recorder Is Ideal for Convenient Screen Capture?

As long as you have a handy and portable screen recorder for PC, you can take screencasts on whatever devices without software download & install at all, via USB drive or online cloud space at will.

Most people get used to working on a fixed computer at home, office or college. However, many still have to work with different machines due to their professions or other restrictions. That makes portable application a go-to pick for accomplishing the regular things on any computer easily, without downloading and installing the same app repeatedly.

As of making screen video, those educators, marketers, gamers, YouTubers and even general users who often change their workstations want to hold a portable screen recorder too for more convenient screen capture work. Considering the diversified screencasting situations and requirements from these screen video creators, I will contain different types of portable screen video capture tools in the following part, including both of standalone desktop apps and the web-based services.

Is Portable Screen Recorder Reliable and Recommended?

Portable screen recording software is usually lightweight and does offer user quick and instant method for grabbing and producing screen video since there’s no need to do time-consuming software package download and further setup. And it’s reliable to some degree, especially when you are undergoing the recording with software located in USB flash drive or so, because the performance of screen recorder is more likely to be affected by these plugged-in devices, say a sudden unplugging caused by external force and an unexpected USB error. Furthermore, if there’s any software update, you should manually give it a refresh.

Compared to traditionally portable screencasting facility working with USB drive, online screen recorders that help accomplish video making totally on the web is more stable and flexible. No matter how many computers you will move between, once there’s an available Internet connection, you are free to access the service and enjoy its advantage.

Conventional portable app is de facto the portable version of a normal desktop program, which is capable of observing personal settings and won’t leave useless file on PC. Then desktop screen recorder vs. online screen recorder, what’s the difference and who is even better? The answer is bound to be distinct under divergent cases. Moereover, convenience usually lives with weakness. For more stable and professional screen capture, running non-portable system-attached screen recorder is far more recommended.

All software products are battling with each other in the game of one-upmanship, where both feature combination and easiness are two key points. In terms of simplicity and functionality, RecMaster, which comes in versions for both Windows and Mac, is recommended here.

On one side, it delivers all-around screen recording abilities to record gameplay, slideshow, full screen movements, picture-in-picture performance, front camera talking, and any (streaming) video/audio. On the other side, the various settings and embedded editor help even the absolute beginner work out preferred, high-quality and pro-level video with clicks. Now you can free download RecMaster and enjoy a light-hearted screen recording journey easily.

Now then, without further ado, if you insist on using a portable app to record screen, let’s move on to the next part right away.

1. CamStudio Portable – A Portable Screen Recorder for Windows

CamStudio is a well-known open source screen recorder for Windows that’s able to record any screen activity (gameplay included) with audio into high-quality MP4, AVI and SWF streaming Flash video. If you mean to record a how-to video tutorial, class course, training footage or similar demonstration with more effects, CamStudio enables you to show cursor with customized highlight looking and visual click feedback, do screen annotation with shapes/layout, conduct video annotation (actually add webcam overlay into screen), and add time stamp/caption/watermark freely. After that, you can decide to save the recorded clips locally, share them with others, or burning them onto discs for permanent storage.

Although this freeware developer has not given it an update for over 7 years, it’s still chased by many Windows users since there are many available portable downloads from PortableApp.com (a top-ranked portable app download site), Softonic and CamStudio’s official forum. So for any customer who often jump from (Windows) PC to PC for vacation and so forth reason and prefer such a portable app running from USB without install anything, CamStudio is worth a shot.

On PortableApp, you can dig out many portable versions of CamStudio like v2.0 (Rev2), v2.72 and 2.6b r294, you can try either as you like to check its real performance. If none of them works as you wish or CamStudio is not compatible with Windows 10, there are quite some alternative apps on PortableApp or other places, for example portable oCam screen recorder, portable Icecream Screen Recorder (Pro), Movavi or ZD Soft one.

2. Screencast-O-Matic – A Browser-based Portable Screencasting Program for Any Mainstream Systems

Apart from Windows, many more systems and devices could be the recording bases, macOS-running iMac/MacBook, iOS iPhone, Android Samsung phone/tab, ChromeOS Chromebook, just to name a few. In view of this, you can turn to Screencast-O-Matic or similar online service to act as one hundred percentage portable screen recorder without machine limitation.

Screencast-O-Matic is a true portable online screen recorder that whenever you set out to do screen video capture, you can start it up by simply navigating to its homepage and launching the free recorder with a button click. As an easy one-stop screen recorder and editor, it not only supports recording whatever screen content with system audio, narration, and webcam, but also has an basic video editor to mix external music/narration, add captions/green screen filter, script recording etc. In addition, it empowers you to one-click share recording to YouTube, Google Drive or its own cloud storage (if you have paid for some).

See also: How to Use Screencast-O-Matic

Provided that you won’t record offline and the recording content is relatively simple, time relatively short, this kind of product is a truly recommended for its easy-peasy access and control. The best part is that it has a wider system support than common desktop portable software indeed. For more online video recorders, you can check out this list article – Best Free Scree Online Recorders for PC.

What’s the Difference Between Portable and Standard Screen Recorder?

Regular and traditional apps ask you to download its own installer on a PC and only when you finish the installation could you launch and use it here. On the contrast, a portable app, put it simply, is a single folder residing all the necessary files to run the app so that you can carry it along to any place, including USB, and make usage of it straightforwardly. Therefore, those portable apps are typically offered online with ZIP downloads, which you must download, extract and run the corresponding executable file every time when it’s called for. Note that in general, portable apps are capable of saving in-app settings.

Can I Make Certain Screen Recorder to a Portable One by Myself?

Theoretically you can make it happen by installing the preferred desktop screen recorder on one PC and then copying & pasting its folder to external USB for further usage. But under certain circumstances, the homemade portable video recorders won’t start or work in the same way as it did before due to system conflict, data missing, premium log-in failure and so on. So you can have a try on it, free software suggested. And if you are left with a sad result, do pick one name mentioned earlier in this post.