11.04.2010 Dear lazyweb: Screencasting under Linux

April 11th, 2011 | General

I’d like to produce screencasts of BEAST, an sequencer/synthesizer under Linux. So ideally, I’d like to record my voice via headset, the screen with the mouse and the output from BEAST. I tried to install Istanbul, mainly because its already packaged for Debian, but it didn’t work.

So if anyone has done screencasting of audio apps (or even normal apps) under Linux and can recommend something that just-works-out-of-the-box, any suggestion is welcome.

18 comments ↓

#1 Jason D. Clinton on 04.11.11 at 21:42

Bottom of this page: https://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/Gnome3In30Seconds/HOWTO

#2 Marius Gedminas on 04.11.11 at 21:53

Of the tools I’ve tried, Kazam seems to be the nicest. IIRC it has a PPA for Ubuntu, but nothing else, not even a proper website with source tarballs. (The source tarballs do exist in the PPA, thanks to Ubuntu’s source-only uploads policy.)

#3 Sumana Harihareswara on 04.11.11 at 22:25

Random resource: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/Gnome3In30Seconds/HOWTO

#4 daniel on 04.11.11 at 22:31

I had the same need yesterday and xvidcap turned out to be really nice and minimalistic, and end result was good quality.

#5 Sebastian Pölsterl on 04.11.11 at 23:43

Have a look at recordmydesktop (http://recordmydesktop.sourceforge.net). Packages should be available as well.

#6 Anonymous on 04.12.11 at 00:07

Did you report a bug about istanbul?

Have you tried recordmydesktop?

#7 jeff on 04.12.11 at 00:27

My usual technique involves combining three pieces of software:
– gtk-recordmydesktop for the video (the audio doesn’t work with pulseaudio; may work for you on debian)
– gnome-sound-recorder
– pitivi for combining the audio and video

As Marius suggested, Kazaam may be nice to try out too.

#8 Paul Frields on 04.12.11 at 01:37

Try byzanz.

#9 Tobias on 04.12.11 at 06:45

I use:
– recordmydesktop for the recording.
– Key Status Monitor to show the keys I’ve use: http://code.google.com/p/key-mon/
– Gromit for notes and arrows: http://www.home.unix-ag.org/simon/gromit/
– PiTiVi for fine tuning

#10 Michael on 04.12.11 at 10:20

I would recommend you to take a look at gromit, to draw directly on the screen. And if everything else fail, vlc can be used to record what is on the screen, so does gstreamer ( that’s what byzanz and istanbul do, in fact ).

#11 Vadim P. on 04.12.11 at 12:45

gtk-recordmydesktop @ 68 quality and “pulse” as the sound device, mkvtools for splitting audio & video tracks, audacity for removing noise, mkvtools again for combining.

Don’t do video editing because that kills quality. You can find my screencasts at http://www.mudlet.org/media/

#12 Abdurrahman AVCI on 04.12.11 at 12:52

Use ffmpeg, records without hampering performance and in high quality. This was the command line I used, but you can search and customize for yourself of course.

ffmpeg -f x11grab -r 30 -s 1366×768 -i :0.0 -acodec pcm_s16le -vcodec libx264 -vpre lossless_ultrafast -threads 0 output.mkv

#13 antono on 04.12.11 at 17:04