FOSS Screencast Tools?

As I wrote yesterday, the Koha IRC meeting started discussing tutorials for new contributors. I’d really like to avoid expecting people to use non-free software to learn about contributing to free software. Too many so-called webinars are not webinars. I want to be part of something better.

So far, it’s been suggested that we could use screen as a multi-user tool [indexdata] and Krut Computer Recorder to make a screencast of it. I’ve used screen, but I’ve not used krut – it has an ubuntu download, so it looks promising at first glance.

What else would you recommend? What have you used that didn’t work? Would you be interested in the tutorials? Have you seen good tutorials covering FOSS participation, git and coding standards which we could adapt?

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7 Responses to FOSS Screencast Tools?

  1. Pingback: MJ Ray (mjray) 's status on Friday, 07-Aug-09 07:29:00 UTC - Identi.ca

  2. kuLa says:

    You should try ‘recordmydesktop’ it’s free and work perfectly.

  3. Alan Pope says:

    I’d take a look at recordmydesktop. It records audio and video to ogv and is in the repos for most distros. I used xvidcap heavily for a while but it seems a bit broken in Ubuntu at the moment. recordmydesktop can be a bit picky when it comes to recording audio, I have experienced the audio and video getting out of sync for example. In the past I have recorded video and audio separately for this reason, and to reduce the “uhms” and “uhh” during recording as one thinks, types and records..

    If you would like to record audio and video at once then take a look at enabling “jack” with recordmydesktop.

    I have also looked at vnc2swf, vncrec and istanbul. All of which are feature lacking.

    I’ll also add DemoRecorder in the mix because although it’s not FOSS, it’s very good and inexpensive.

    If you’d like to create high quality (i.e. no video degradation) screencasts then take a look at this post to the Ubuntu Doc mailing list which outlines how one can create a screencast using ffmpeg.

    https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/2009-June/013251.html

    If you have any other questions, feel free to drop me a mail.

  4. Corsac says:

    I had good results with recordmydesktop

  5. auser says:

    have you tried vlc (videolan.org) see [1] for a quick intro.
    [2] has a link-list of open source screencast tools

    [1] http://www.madpole.com/screencast-using-videolan-mac-os-x/en/
    [2] http://www.openscreencast.de/wiki/index.php/Screencast-Tools

  6. Tim Freund says:

    I am recording a screencast for work with recordMyDesktop. I use Xephyr to create a nested X server of the correct size for my recording, and I start recordMyDesktop inside of the nested X server.

  7. MJ Ray says:

    Thanks so much everyone! I have ffmpeg and vlc installed already, so they’re interesting, but it sounds like http://recordmydesktop.sourceforge.net/ is also worth a look.

    Any thoughts on good re-usable tutorials introducing FOSS participation, git and coding standards?

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