Ubuntu Desktop screen record – XVidCap
In some of my development and training guides, I like to use screen record and then post the videos online. It can show you rather than reading instructions,(as they say a picture says a 1000 words).
In doing so I use Ubuntu alot and find that a simple screen capture tool to use is XVidCap, this can usually be found in the repositories and can be installed.
Quick Tip:
On most of the installations, it has not worked, you press the record button and nothing happens. A solution to this is to add some different libraries, go to the Synaptic Package manger and install the libavcodec-unstripped-52 package, this should hopefully sort out the problem, also there have been reports of disabling the audio (not that I have found this feature yet)
Good luck
For audio problems: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=10607591 :
1. Uninstall xvidcap in Synaptic
2. Install xvidcap from http://sourceforge.net/projects/xvidcap/files/xvidcap/1.1.7/xvidcap_1.1.7jaunty_i386.deb/download
3. Lock the installed version in Synaptic
4. Install pavucontrol in Synaptic (Needed in Ubuntu 10.04 but not in Linux Mint 10: already present)
5. Open the program with padsp xvidcap
6. Click on the recording button (red circle)
7. Run pavucontrol, go to the Recording tab and there choose Monitor of Analog Stereo Internal Audio
Done!!
To record with sound, the program has always to be run with padsp xvidcap (for example from ALT+F2). To run it always like that from the menu: run alacarte, go to Sound and video, then to XVidCap Screen Capture, Properties and where it says Command put padsp xvidcap.
[ I would add this: ]
The stated is to record the system sound, that is, the one coming out of the speakers, that can be of a song or movie of our hard drive or pendrive played by Totem, of a Flash music video of a website played by Firefox, …
Nevertheless, sometimes it can be necessary to record the microphone sound, for example if we want to make a videotutorial to explain how a program works. In this case we put xvidcap in recording state, run pavucontrol and in the Recording tab we put Analog Stereo Internal Audio (without “Monitor of” ahead).
If we only want to record sound (without video) we can run from ALT+F2 gnome-sound-recorder. The first time probably it will be configured to record from the microphone. To record the system sound we run with ALT+F2 gnome-volume-control, go to the Hardware tab and in Profile we put Analog Stereo Output (it’s also possible to do this running pavucontrol and using the Configuration tab).
But when we finish we have to put again Analog Stereo Duplex in the Profile of Hardware of gnome-volume-control (or of Configuration of pavucontrol), so we can still choose the origin of the sound when recording with xvidcap.
NB: sometimes, to change from Analog Stereo Duplex to Analog Stereo Output it may be necessary to change first to Off, close, open again and then change finally to Analog Stereo Output. The same for the opposite change. If not, the computer may “not notice” that we have applied the change.