How-To: Make a Screencast with recordMyDesktop

    recordMyDesktop is a command-line tool which allows to record your entire Linux desktop and save it as a Theora Ogg video. It has GTK and Qt frontends too, and in Ubuntu gtk-recordmydesktop is available in the repositories. To install recordmydesktop in Ubuntu, just type in the GNOME Terminal:

    sudo apt-get install recordmydesktop

    And if you want the GTK frontend, use:

    sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop

    The simplest way to record your desktop is to run the command recordmydesktop without any parameters inside a terminal, then do whatever you wanted to do, and when you feel the screencast is over, type Ctrl+C in the terminal where you started recordmydesktop to stop it. It will start the procedure of encoding the video to Ogg Theora, which can take a while. The default output file will be out.ogv, located in the same directory from where you started recordmydesktop:


    You can also choose the name of the output file:

    recordmydesktop -o my_screencast.ogv

    Or make it encode the video on-the-fly, so you won't have to wait after hitting Ctrl+C:

    recordmydesktop --on-the-fly-encoding my_screencast.ogv

    You can specify a region to record only:

    recordmydesktop -x x_position -y y_position -width width -height height

    Some other useful switches for recordmydesktop are:

    -v-quality - video quality, from 0 to 63, default is maximum
    -s-quality - sound quality, from -1 to 10, default is 6
    -v-bitrate - video bitrate, from 45000 to 200000, default is 45000
    -device - sound device
    -channels - number of audio channels

    gtk-recordmydesktop - GTK frontend

    However there was a problem recording visual effects in Kubuntu, the resulted screencast having many artefacts.
    Source URL: http://ashesgarrett.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-to-make-screencast-with.html
    Visit ashes garrett for Daily Updated Hairstyles Collection

Blog Archive