Here are five popular ways to capture desktop screencast for Linux
1) Istanbul: 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.
2) Wink: 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:
3) Xvidcap: 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.
4) vnc2swf: 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.
5) Recordmydesktop: 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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