Eyes Above The Waves

Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Repatriate Kiwi. Hacker.

Tuesday 20 August 2013

Creating Screencasts On Linux

I had great difficulty creating a good screencast for the previous blog post. Various tools I tried all had horrible flicker problems in the captured video. I think the problem is related to the GNOME compositing window manager I'm using in Fedora 18. After various tools failed, I solved the problem using vncserver to set up a separate X11 display in which to run the demo app, and using ffmpeg to record the video like so:

ffmpeg -f x11grab -s 1024x768 -i eternity:2 capture.webm
(where 'eternity:2' is the DISPLAY for the vncserver)

Update: Ignore the above solution. Andrew Overholt pointed out that GNOME Shell has screen-casting built in: just press Ctrl-Alt-Shift-R to start and stop, and .webm files are dumped in your Videos directory. It works perfectly for me! Somehow in all my Internet searching I never discovered this feature.

Comments

Andrew Overholt
How does GNOME Shell's built-in recorder (start/stop with Ctrl-Alt-Shift-r) do?
Robert
Huh. It works perfectly and produces WEBM too. I don't know how I failed to find this. I'll update the post.