There's plenty of info available on how to create screencapture videos for the Windows and Mac platforms but, what about Linux? Chris Cherrett has come up with a simple (and free) solution...
Chris writes:
I have been working on trying to figure out how to create high quality video tutorials based on screen captures in Linux for about two years now. I have tried vncrec and export to xpm then to png. I have tried istanbul, vncswf, raw X captures via bash script, vmware workstation's avi capture function, and a few I have forgot about I am sure :) After all my research and pain I have finally found the solution that is fast flexible and gives great results. It is not Open Source but it is a free download for Linux. You may have heard of it before. Wink is a utility for creating flash/swf based presentations. While experimenting with capturing my screens with it, I found the answer I was looking for.
1. Using Wink, capture your video and then stop capture.
2. Wink loads the video into it's editor.
3. Instead of rendering the video as an swf file, select File->Export as HTML.
4. Name your html file and select your image output format.
5. Click OK.You now have a sequence of crystal clear PNGs, or whatever format you selected, ready for editing in the Blender Sequencer!
It is just that easy!
P.S. - Load the images as an image sequence in the Compositor and now you can overlay a sound track. :)
Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software. Using Wink, you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles, etc. and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users.
You can get the Wink application here.
23 Comments
Yes, wink is good choise, hopefully 2.0 will be available for Linux some day as well. On windows, version 2.0 also supports audio capturing.
.::PiPi::.
Did you try recordMyDesktop ?
This is an excellent program from John Varouhakis, you can find on many Linux distributions and that work very well form me.
It records both screen capture an synchronized audio. Output is Ogg-Theora-Vorbis and is supported by ffmpeg (an then blender...). Nevertheless you may have to convert it back to png, (still with ffmpeg) if you want to be able to randomly seek into the video stream with blender.
I really think this solution is better than wink, an not only because it is open :-)
http://recordmydesktop.sourceforge.net/
Edouard.
Or may be xvidcap too...
There's a video capturing program for Beryl too. :/
Just what I need! Thank you!!! :)
recordmydesktop is definitely a better solution imho.
deffinetly recordmydesktop :)
sudo apt-get install recordmydesktop
(pass)
recordmydesktop --full-shots myVideo.ogg
(do whatever with blender, you can speak with mic too)
(press ctrl+c and wait to finish encoding)
Enjoy!!
Caution, I typed 2 hyphens ( - - ) and they was converted to a one large hyphen ( -- ), so copy-paste doesn't work
There's a video capturing program for Beryl too.
Yes Beryl is great for this, because it also has another plugin that lets you draw on the desktop display like it's a dry-erase marker board. Very handy when creating tutorial videos.
I love XVidCAP
recordmydesktop had huge gnome dependencies... so i haven't had a chance to try it.
but those of you that have, what kind of fps are you getting on higher resolution sizes?
fps seems to be the problem with some of these linux screen recorders.
.b
@basse: Smooth at 1920x1200 in my computer. recordmydesktop doesn't have any gnome dependencies, unless you use gtk-recordmydesktop. There is a qt version as well, but I didn't try it.
As I mentioned above, add the --full-shots option, it's needed for openGL captures.
This idea of joining Wink with Blender is quite clever. However, I also use recordMydesktop. I can't get smooth full screen grabs from my laptop so I use only portion of the screen.
recordmydesktop -width 800 -height 620 -o test.ogg --no-sound --full-shots
Blender is of course started with:
./blender -p 0 0 800 600 -W
The problem I always ran into was not being able to capture smooth videos. With wink I was able. I never tried recordmydesktop however I will give that a go. thanks
Beryl has a video screen capture plugin? Where?
istanbul is pretty good, and it supports capturing beryl 3d graphics, I've had afew performance issues on my older hardware, but anyone with a decently fast computer shouldnt have any problems, it will also record sound so you can turn your mic on, and record your voice at the same time. Its pretty handy :D
I try recordmydesktop but when I try to open the ogg totem, vlc... crash but I'm newbie and I don't know why
I install automatix for codecs and so on
Some help, please?
Thanks!
@Garito
Have you tried the method that the article suggests?
@Kernon
Why? recordmydesktop doesn't work? Or...
I can't view ogg because of recordmydesktop?
Sorry but I can't understand what you're trying to explain to me
Thanks for your interest...
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None of the tools mentioned before can even compared to the built in features for Wink. For one all they do is just the screen capture, editing comes after. Wink can edit, do a whole presentation, place visual notes and it's output in in flash.
I have use all the screencast options mentioned before, give wink a first.
Over at the freegamer blog, they highly recommend glc for video capture..
http://nullkey.ath.cx/projects/glc/
Haven't tried it myself, but it's got excellent performance judging by the smoothness of the game videos they made with it, as opposed to the other tools they were using.