RecordMyDesktop – Fedora 15 – video tutorial

Welcome to itAssistant! I’m Alex and i wish to show you how to do screencasts in Fedora 15, and on all the other linux distributions which use either gnome shell, kde, xfce and so on.

The video that i made presents the configuration of gtk-recordmydesktop running on Fedora 15.

For the installation I recommend, doing it by the terminal, like this:

• for ubuntu/debian (gnome,xfce,lxde): sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop
• for ubuntu/debian (kde): sudo apt-get install qt-recordmydesktop
• for fedora/rhel/centos (gnome,xfce,lxde): su -c ‘yum install gtk-recordmydesktop’
• for fedora/rhel/centos (kde): su -c ‘yum install qt-recordmydesktop’

After the install we run the program, from the menu, usually it’s placed, in Sound&Video or Multimedia sub-menus; and we should have something like this:

From this main window you can chose the video & sound quality of the final output file, to or not to use sound at all; to select a window which should be as target for the recording, to start recording; where to save; and also some Advanced features.

Let’s go to Advanced and chose directly Performance.

Here we have 5 main options, regarding quality and speed of the screencast.

1. Frames Per Second (the higher the number of the frames, the higher the quality, also you will notice that the output file is larger in memory size, the lower the slower, the minimal quality, the smallest file size).

2. Encode On the Fly (Encode While Recording; not recommended, because the sound encoding falls behind the video presentation, the movie ends, the sound commentary has still something to say).

3. Zero Compression (Best Compression, takes longer to encode, because it does the encoding after you stop recording).

4. Quick Subsampling (bad video quality recording, fast and furious)

5. Full shots at every frame (to be used when recording 3D effects such as compiz cube, metacity composition, gnome-shell, games, movies and so on; if there is no composition, it will automatically disable itself).

Next we have the Sound tab:

And there are 3 main options, Channels, Frequency, Device.

The most important is Device, which by default it uses a string of characters: DEFAULT.

This uses the main device for recording, which should be “/dev/dsp”; however some new linux systems don’t have /dev/dsp, and that would not do the trick.

Therefor, my advice is to check what device is available for you, just by running the preferences of Audacity.

From a terminal/Konsole window:

Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install audacity ; Fedora: su -c ‘yum install audacity’

Check your available recording and playback devices …

… then you copy that “code” like “hw:0,0″ from the recording device, into that text field in the Sound submenu from GTK-RecordMyDesktop.

And Finally the most important settings that allow gnome shell to be recorded is the Misc submenu.

I will explain only the essential: the two options, “Outline Capture Area On Screen” and “Reset Capture Area” must be checked out; otherwise the session of gnome shell 3 may become unstable.

After all the steps have been carried out, prepare your speech, based on what you want to present, use the system-Tray(bottom panel) to start/stop recording and GOOD LUCK!!!

These settings should enable screencasting on all the Linux distros available.

For Gnome Shell 3 Based Distros (ex: Fedora 15)

• Do not panic in case of a recording using the default settings.
• The panels are just outlined by the RecordMyDesktop program; use the Meta-Key or Win-Key to view the Activities Area or simply use Alt+F2 to restart the Shell Session (it’s not the same thing with the Xorg Session, or back to Login Window).
• In case if the panels keep hiding, use Meta-Key/Win-Key to get access to your opened windows, save your work, and Log-out (Hit Ctrl+Alt+F2, login in the terminal with your user and password, and do a: su -c ‘pkill Xorg’ ; that will restart the Xorg session).