Create Screencasts on OpenSuSe with recordMyDesktop

A picture is worth a thousand words, especially when you're teaching someone how to do something on a computer, and recordMyDesktop is a great little Linux application for creating screencasts. YouTube is full of recordMyDesktop screencasts showing all kinds of captures, including Compiz in action.

recordMyDesktop is a program that captures audio-video data of a desktop session, producing an ogg-encapsulated theora-vorbis file.

recordMyDesktop tries to be as unobstrusive as possible by processing only regions of the screen that have changed.

The program is separated in two parts; a simple command line tool that performs the basic tasks of capturing and encoding and an interface that exposes the program functionality in a usable way. The frontend comes in two versions. One frontend is written with the gtk toolkit (named gtk-recordMyDesktop) and a more recent one with the Qt toolkit (qt-recordMyDesktop).

recordMyDesktop also offers the ability to record audio through ALSA, OSS or the JACK audio server.

Installation: Use "1-click" installer to install gtkpod
OpenSuSe 11.1 - here

After successful installation go to console and use command: gtk-recordMyDesktop to launch recordMyDesktop application

Running from 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:1152    Height:864                    
Adjusted recording window is set to:                     
X:0   Y:0    Width:1152    Height:864                    
Your window manager appears to be KWin
....
^C
*********************************************
Cached 42 MB, from 3189 MB that were received.
Average cache compression ratio: 98.7 %
*********************************************
Saved 840 frames in a total of 1123 requests
Shutting down......
STATE:ENCODING
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...
Output file: newtest.ogg.ogv
[100%]
Encoding finished!
Wait a moment please...

Done.
Written 6587308 bytes
(6587308 of which were video data and 0 audio data)

Cleanning 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.