Record Your Desktop With recordMyDesktop
A Simple Video Capture
Carla Schroder
Thursday, June 5, 2008 01:33:17 PM
You don't get much in the way of helpful feedback from the graphical frontends, so we'll start with a simple full-screen video-only capture using the command line. Hit Ctrl+C to stop recording:
$ recordmydesktop --no-sound -o newtest.ogg
Initial recording window is set to:
X:0 Y:0 Width:1680 Height:1050
Adjusted recording window is set to:
X:0 Y:4 Width:1680 Height:1040
Your window manager appears to be KWin
Initializing...
Capturing!
Shutting down.Saved 684 frames in a total of 686 requests
.....
Encoding started!
This may take several minutes.
Pressing Ctrl-C will cancel the procedure (resuming will not be possible, but
any portion of the video, which is already encoded won't be deleted).
Please wait...
[100%]
Encoding finished!
Wait a moment please...
Done.
Written 5590071 bytes
(5590071 of which were video data and 0 audio data)
Cleaning up cache...
Done!!!
Goodbye!
The result is an ogg theora-encoded video file named newtest.ogg, and it should be playable in most Linux media players, such as Kaffeine, VLC, and MPlayer. Remember that multimedia files are greedy of disk space. My simple 45-second test file used 5.3 megabytes.
ogg theora is supported on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, though you'll probably have to hunt down and install plugins or players. You can convert your movie to a widely-supported format such as AVI or MPEG4, which we'll get into next week
Next: Adding Audio »
