Screencasts on Linux Made Easy

Productivity Sauce

Need to create a screencast to demonstrate an application feature or nifty software technique? The easiest way to do this is to install the recordMyDesktop screen recording utility and the gtk-recordMyDesktop graphical front-end to it. Most mainstream Linux distributions include both packages in their repositories, so you can quickly install them using your system's package manager. On Debian-based distros like Sidux, installing both packages is a matter of running the apt-get install recordMyDesktop gtk-recordMyDesktop command.

The utility saves the recorded video as a .ogv file, which is fine if you want to share it with other Linux users. But if you want to share the screencast with the world by uploading it to one of many video services such as YouTube or Vimeo, you have to convert the .ogv file into one of the formats supported by these services. To do this, you need to install two missing pieces first: the mencoder command-line video conversion tool and Windows codecs. Neither Debian nor Ubuntu have these packages in their default repositories, so you have to add a repository containing them. On Sidux (which is based on Debian Sid), you have to add the following repository using either the terminal or Synaptic:

deb http://debian-multimedia.org/ sid main

On Ubuntu, you have to add the Medibuntu repository, and the Ubuntu Documentation Wiki explains how to do this. Run then the following command to reload the repository information and install the mencoder and w32codecs packages:

apt-get update
apt-get install mencoder w32codecs

Now you can convert the .ogv screencast into the .avi file using the command below (replace input.ogv and output.avi with the source and target files):

mencoder -idx input.ogv -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -o output.avi

That's all there is to it.

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