creating screencasts in linux
Posted by Paul Howard - 26/02/08 at 03:02:43 pmHave you ever had to create a screencast while using Linux?
What I thought was going to be the nightmare task of finding usable software to do this actually turned out to be incredibly easy. After a few quick Googles I settled on recordMyDesktop which seemed very lightweight but quite powerful. It did, in fact, capture screencasts and save them in the ogg format. A quick pass through VLC to reencode them and I had them in a format usable for a standard Windows machine to play. This is a far as I could go though. There is no way of adding text or graphics to the screens that you have captured.
A bit more Googling brought me to Wink. Wink is dedicated Tutorial and Presentation creation software and does exactly what I needed. You choose which window or area of the screen to capture, and away you go. Once captured you are free to edit the screencast, add titles, pause the show to add back/next buttons, or just add titles to the whole screencast.
Output formats are flash (.swf) or standalone .exe for windows users. I think you can publish to other formats too but haven’t had time to look through all the options just yet.
Learning how to use it took less than twenty minutes and within an hour I had my first screencast all saved, edited and published to some users to test.
Overall a very impressive bit of free software.
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I’ve just completed my first two Linux screencasts and, since I wanted the ability to edit the resulting video for clarity (snipping out mis-spoken words, for example, and letting myself attempt multiple takes at particularly error-prone sequences), my experience wound up being much more harrowing than yours was! Like you, I quickly settled on RecordMyDesktop as my recording software. But once I wanted to start editing the result, things got much more complicated. I just last night completed a blog posting about screencasting under Linux if you’re curious about the extra steps that were required to cleanly edit the video in a non-linear video editor.
Comment by Brandon Craig Rhodes
— February 27, 2008 #