A Place for my head

Sorry for yet another do this – do that, crap of screencasting in Linux. Well, most of the tools out there simply doesn’t work (yeah, I have tried plenty of them).

Finally, I have settled down on ffmpeg, which works perfectly well for screencasts with both audio and video.

Here are step by step instructions on How to make Screencasts in Linux(Ubuntu 8.04 in my case, but you get the idea) using ffmpeg.

• Get ffmpeg dependencis :

  sudo aptitude install build-essential subversion zlib1g-dev \
    checkinstall libgpac-dev libfaad-dev libfaac-dev liblame-dev \
    libtheora-dev libvorbis-dev gpac

• Get X11 dependencies :

  sudo aptitude install libx11-dev xlibs-static-dev \
    x11proto-input-dev

• Get ffmpeg code from svn, compile and install:

  svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
  cd ffmpeg
  ./configure --prefix=/opt/ffmpeg --enable-gpl --enable-postproc \
    --enable-libvorbis --enable-libtheora --disable-debug \
    --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libfaad --enable-libfaac \
    --enable-pthreads --enable-x11grab
  make
  sudo make install

• Record high quality screencasts with:

  ffmpeg -f oss -i /dev/dsp -f x11grab -s 1024x768 -r ntsc \
    -sameq -i :0.0 foo.avi