iEntry 10th Anniversary
LinuxHaxor
WH
MH5 Ways to Screencast Your Linux Desktop
Istanbul is one of the more widely used desktop recording software out there. You can download Istanbul from here. Debian and Fedora users should be able to install it from the repo. Istanbul has a very simple interface (or lack of). When you first start up Istanbul, you will see a small red button on your desktop panel.
Right click on the button and it will give you options and ways to record you desktop by window you choose or desktop area you select by mouse.
You can stop recording you session by left clicking on the record button, and it will prompt you save the screencast:
By default, Istanbul saves your video in Ogg format.
Wink gives you more control over you Screencast than any Linux screencast software I have tried, and the fact that it doesn’t actually takes videos in the conventional sense of taking videos of your desktop screen, it gives you more control over your video. Wink takes video by taking screenshots of your desktop in frames per second. If you set your Wink to take 20 frames per second and take one minute worth of screencast with wink, it will have roughly 1200 screenshots of your desktop in one minute, which you can edit one screenshot at a time giving you more control over the video. Wink saves the video in shockwave format which you can later convert into whatever format you wish to.
You can download wink from it’ website here.
Wink will not work with newer distros of Ubuntu 8.04, or any Linux distros with libexpat.so.1 file located in /usr/lib/. A temporary solution that worked for me was to simply rename the file to libexpat.so.0, even thoughI didn’t have any problem with my system after doing this and everything worked ok, it is not highly recommended as it might effect other program using this file. You can rename it back to it’s original format when you are done. A permanent solution would be to recompile the program and link it to the new libraries; or wait for it to be officially updated by the author.
To start doing screencast with Wink, start a new project with File –> New, and select the screen size you would like to record.
(click for larger view)
You will see that by default it capture 50 frames/second in Time capture Mode.
After selecting OK a window will pop up giving your shortcuts for video capture.
Select “Minimize To Tray”. From the desktop panel right click on the icon and select “Start Timed Capture”, to start capturing your desktop.
You can select “Stop Timed Capture” whenever you think you are done with your work. It will tell you how many frames have been captured.
To get your video you have to render all the image files into a video file. And now you have a video of your desktop.
Render Images:
Save file options:
This is a nice little video capturing app that does the job, however for me it was a little too buggy for my liking. You can download xvidcap from here. When you start xvidcap, it will give you red square to work with, which represents the space that will be captured, you can drag the square to your liking, depending on how much you want to capture. To start capturing just click onthe red button. Other options including the ability to choose a screen area to capture and detach the frame area from the video capture selection. However if you select the whole desktop screen or large portion of the desktop screen, this will slow down your computer to a crawl.
Another popular, but inconvenient, way to screencast desktop is to use vnc2swf to record desktop sessions. vnc2swf works by connecting to vncserver and recording sessions. Debian users can use this program by installing sudo apt-get install pyvnc2swf. Others can download from it’s website: http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/
To start recording, assuming you have vnc server installed, just type this command in the terminal vnc2swf -o test.swf -N -S localhost:0 and it should pop up a simple window for recording purpose.
For more options check out the official documentation.
Another fairly widely used desktop recording application which runs in command and has a graphical frontend, debian user can install both with apt-get, sudo apt-get install recordmydesktop gtk-recordmydesktop, others can download from their project page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/recordmydesktop. Recordmydesktop works the same way as Istanbul and has almost the same look and feel down to the desktop panel shortcut. But RMD has more advanced options that are missing in Istanbul. the options are self-explanatory and should be fairly easy to configure.
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The big problem with Istanbul on Debian and Ubuntu is the two bugs it has had for a couple of years now.
1) Video alternates between screen capture and black unless you choose “Record 3D,” which takes a full screen capture every frame.
2) The application hangs if you choose “Record sound.”
These make the program almost useless.
I think you mean to say, these are methods to record a Gnome desktop, since you left out various KDE-specific applications and therefor seem to focus on the Gnome desktop and not the Linux desktop. Gnome is not Linux, nor is Ubuntu.
for the wink lib problem, a permanent fix is this:
ln -s /usr/lib/libexpat.so.1 /usr/lib/libexpat.so.0
I also forgot about this: demorecorder - http://demorecorder.com It is commercial but still cheap. It is the easiest to install, easiest to use, has the most features and export options, and does the best job. The developer is also a really cool person who answers emails quickly if you have a question. I know about this program because I was doing reviews about screen recorders 3 years ago looking for something to take the place of camtasia on windows while I was teaching an online linux course at the local college (the college wanted ms word documents and video casts using camtasia - I used open office writer, pdf export function, open office impress, and demorecorder - they never knew any different)
Dude, Linux is da Shiz yo!
JT
The recording format is something important which, I think, is understated in this writeup. Istanbul looks nice and easy and I was thinking of trying it until I read that it records video.
vnc2swf translates screen updates into Flash graphics, which consumes a lot less bandwidth and disk space than actual video does. And then of course with Flash you don’t have to worry about whether the people viewing your web site have the right video player installed, because everyone has Flash installed.
We used vnc2swf for a demo of Citadel [http://www.citadel.org] and it’s been quite a success.
I can too strongly recommend DemoRecorder - http://demorecorder.com . I use it for my video podcast about GIMP. Just now some nice features are in the pipeline - I am one of the testers.
I tried all of the above and found recordmydesktop the most usable of them. But it ha(s|d) an issue with keeping sync between video and sound under higher processor loads. Then the sound lags behind and cathes up later again. Nasty if you say “..and now I press this button…” and the dialog is already gone. ;-) This never happens wit DemoRecorder.
http://screencast-o-matic.com/
Crossplatform. Automatic publishing.
Great List.. RecordMyDesktop is my fave…
I agree with the comment above that the format is important. This is why I am particularly interested in Byzanz:
=> http://phorolinux.com/record-your-linux-desktop-with-byzanz.html
It records to animated GIF files, which makes it very suitable for websites. Until recently, I have used a video card which did not have a driver except VESA - which made Byzanz practically usable. But I am considering taking it up again.
infact i was looking for this for a week, but didn’t had much free time to digg.
Thanks you made my day.
I’ve tried to use these, and I’ve found recordmydesktop to be the most usable for me; however, it seems to suffer from major choppy framerate issues, regardless of the framerate I set, so I can’t say I’m really happy with it.
I believe you forgot byzanz.
you forgot about itaka!!!
http://www.gtkfiles.org/app.php/Itaka
WebHuddle.SourceForge.net
WebHuddle is an open source cross-platform LDAP integrated Java based web meeting and desktop recording package.
thank you (usefull)
I’m more curious about your screenshots, they look very nice with all those shadows. What software did you use?
@Srikanth I use photoshop and Gimp, when using a windows computer and running Linux as a virtual machine I use a commercial windows program known as snagit. Of course there are softwares that probably does the some thing for free.
I considered a few in my blogpost @ http://alicious.com/2008/videomovie-screen-capture-programs-for-ubuntu-linux/#more-39 and settled on the KDE version of recordmydesktop.
Istanbul also looked good, it would have been my choice but for some bugginess (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=418841). Not had chance/cause to check if that’s fixed now.
—
Note that DemoRecorder mentioned in comments is a pay for application; the free version doesn’t do full-screen and adds watermarks.
it is curious, but only istanbul is on my debian repository.
Thanks for your post. He is usefull ….
ScreenToaster works under Linux as long as you have Java installed. (http://screentoaster.com)
I think it’s still in beta, though.
Don’t rename the file, create a symbolic link.
This is a fantastic overview for the Linux screencasting community and I would greatly appreciate your permission to republish the post (with full credits and trackbacks) to http://scrast.net, a new screencasting-centric website that is a repository for valuable content like yours. Thanks for your consideration, Pavs.
http://scrast.net, http://twitter.com/scrast