Thorsten's Weblog

Having a video in your Impress slideshow is nice, not being able to control start, stop or pause during your talk is sometimes just an annoyance. I recently got around fixing that, and put up a little screencast (ogg video, see here for a list of players) that should give you an idea what’s possible now (stuff as usual available in recent go-oo builds).

Note: the used video is Big Buck Bunny, copyright Blender Foundation | www.bigbuckbunny.org, and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.

Being honoured with having a session at the OpenSuSE Helping Hands, I faced the problem of creating a screencast under Linux. Considering the load of vnc-based solutions inherently un-sexy, I tried istanbul and recordmydesktop – with the latter appealing to my knack for command-line utils (an extra requirement was no-hassles support for the very nice USB headset MMX2, which recordmydesktop’s “-device” option solved quite nicely).

So without further ado, here’s the recordmydesktop v0.3.7.3 cmd line I used:

recordmydesktop -delay 2 -device hw:1,0 --on-the-fly-encoding -s_quality 1 -width 1024 -height 768 --quick-subsampling --overwrite -o "path_to_ogg_file"

Of course the device option can either be ommitted, or needs to be adapted, depending on your local alsa setup. Recording starts after two seconds, when you’re done with your ramblings, press Alt-Ctrl-S. Some results of me doing screencasts can be found here.