LWN: Comments on "Linux screen recording"

Linux screen recording

resplin — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 20:00:12 +0000

Freeseer is another good option.

http://freeseer.github.com/

Linux screen recording

anselm — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 08:59:12 +0000

When I start KDEnlive it complains that I don't have RecordMyDesktop installed. To me this suggests that its screen-recording facility is based on RecordMyDesktop.

Linux screen recording

jospoortvliet — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:58:46 +0000

I believe KDenlive also has the ability to record screen video but I'm unsure if it's just based on RecordMyDesktop or not...

Linux screen recording

jospoortvliet — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:56:31 +0000

Not unprecedented. In my experience, recordmydesktop usually 'just works'. However, when it doesn't, it's incredibly hard to find out what's wrong and fix it...

Linux screen recording - Istanbul does support audio recording

oaubert — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:23:45 +0000

The article claims that Istanbul lacks the ability to record audio. This is untrue: I use it regularly, and audio is successfully recorded along the video. Looking at the git history, sound support has been added on 2006-07-01, so it definitely should be present in available versions, regardless of the distribution.

Linux screen recording

pclouds — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:53:06 +0000

Can you share the script?

Linux screen recording

bronson — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:14:28 +0000

You use that with Gnome Shell?? What video card?

For me, a similar configuration on a 3 year old Radeon is near unusable.

Xvidcap

pflugstad — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:08:33 +0000

Heh - this article was about two weeks to late for me.

After 5 minutes of google searching, I installed and successfully used Xvidcap (http://xvidcap.sourceforge.net/) to capture a MPG4 video of a window on my screen (under Xubuntu 11.10). Even though the last release was 2006, it's in Debian, so it installed with just an apt-get. The options window was a bit flaky, but it worked just fine and was trivial to use.

Linux screen recording

mathstuf — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 05:05:47 +0000

If you're fine with sitting in a terminal, you can set up a tmux session, change the group permissions on the socket for read-only, make a user that triggers attaching to the session read-only on login and you can do a coding demo or something right there. It would require a decent terminal on the client side, but xterm is pretty ubiquitous these days.

Linux screen recording

mgedmin — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:39:32 +0000

There's also Kazam. It has a very nice simple UI and requires less CPU power than RecordMyDesktop, IIRC. It lacked some features (e.g. recording just an area of the screen) back when I last tried it, but was very promising.

Linux screen recording

Klavs — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:58:08 +0000

wouldn't vnc fit the bill for that? (it can allow to connect in "view-only" mode as well.

Linux screen recording

Cyberax — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:46:17 +0000

Try TeamViewer.

It's free for non-commercial use and works fine in Linux.

Linux screen recording

khim — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:02:50 +0000

Well, I'm not sure if Hangout will work with just HTML5 any time soon (HTML5 just recently added a webcam support and it's not yet all that stable across browsers) but the very feature you request will probably always require some kind of plugin: it's just too scary to imagine that you can accidentally give some random website an access to your desktop to spy on you.

Linux screen recording

angdraug — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:34:39 +0000

You're right, I forgot about G+ Hangout. I summarily removed it from my list of suitable options, because it requires a browser plugin, and non-free at that: Skype is the last bit of proprietary crap I have on my laptop, I look forward to the moment I can afford to ditch it, too. When Hangout works with just HTML5, or when there's a fully-functional free plugin for pidgin or somesuch, I'll give it another try.

Linux screen recording

khim — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:52:11 +0000

Actually Skype is not the one tool with this [claimed] capability. Google+ Hangout also offers this capability - although it can not actually "share" the desktop, it can only show it.

Linux screen recording

angdraug — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:20:11 +0000

A much more difficult problem for which I haven't yet found any (even non-free) solution is real-time sharing of a Linux desktop. Scenario: I need to run an interactive knowledge transfer session where I receive answers from the audience and I show them how to do things they're asking me about. The only free (as in beer) tool I found that even claims this capability is Skype, and being proprietary PoS that it is it Just Doesn't Work (tm).

Linux screen recording

mhelsley — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 03:38:44 +0000

I've had problems with mplayer and ogg format video -- black squares showed up in a semi-random checkerboard pattern. A different movie player seemed to avoid that problem.

Linux screen recording

Velmont — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 01:36:39 +0000

Only don't press that on your double HD screen setup. That's 3840x1080 pixels, and it killed my machine. Total crash. :-)

They did not work for me

dowdle — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:49:48 +0000

recordMyDesktop works great for me. I use Fedora. I've even had recordMyDesktop work inside of a KVM VM.... yes with sound.

There have been times when I've had to run the graphical PulseAudio Volume Control app to tweek the devices in use. On some computers there is a back mic port and a front mic port... and if it isn't set to the one you are using, it ain't going to work.

There does exist some hardware where the mic doesn't work. I haven't run into any for a while now but I think some are still out there.

Regarding whoever said the "Advanced" button doesn't do anything for them, it works fine for me. It opens up a multi-tabbed dialogue box. I haven't altered any settings in there for a while so I haven't verified if changing something works or not but the last time I tried it, it did.

Linux screen recording

marduk — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:33:03 +0000

I still use a home-brewed ffmpeg-based script. Every time I try one of the others there's always something buggy, missing, or just not good.

Linux screen recording

Frej — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:31:21 +0000

Gnome-shell should record video with just: Control+Shift+Alt+R

They did not work for me

jmalcolm — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 07:58:23 +0000

Sadly, I failed at my first attempt to get usable video out of recordMyDesktop and friends just last month. No amount of Googling turned up a way to get the audio to work. I did try the link you cite as well as a number of tricks with 'pavucontrol'.

I ended up buying a copy of iShowU to run on a Mac laptop. It was a real shame.

Linux screen recording

pr1268 — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 04:20:18 +0000

Thanks for the write-up; I wasn't aware (prior to reading your article) that free (both meanings) software existed for capturing screen video in Linux.

Curiously, the latest version (0.3.8.1) is over three years old (Dec. 13, 2008). I'm wondering if (hoping that) this software is still actively maintained.

I've noted some issues when running this program via the Qt4 front-end: (1) the "Advanced" button does absolutely nothing, and (2) the resultant Ogg video file plays back at the wrong speed (but maybe that's an MPlayer config option I've got to fiddle with). Thanks again for the article!