Monday 13 August 2012

Screen Recording Software Solutions For Linux

Windows users have several options to choose from when it comes to the desktop recording (and only paid ones are good generally) but Linux users have fewer options but robust, simple, and best of all, free and open source desktop screen recording tools that we can trust on.

Below are some of the screen recording tools you might want to try:

recordMyDesktop


recordMyDesktop is a desktop session recorder for GNU/Linux written in C. recordMyDesktop itself is a command-line tool and few GUI frontends are also available for this tool. There are two frontends, written in python with pyGtk (gtk-recordMyDesktop) and pyQt4 (qt-recordMyDesktop). recordMyDesktop offers also the ability to record audio through ALSA, OSS or the JACK audio server. Also, recordMyDesktop produces files using only open formats. These are theora for video and vorbis for audio, using the ogg container.

Installation under debian and ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop

XVidCap


XVidCap is a small tool to capture things going on on an X-Windows display to either individual frames or an MPEG video. It enables you to capture videos off your X-Window desktop for illustration or documentation purposes.It is intended to be a standards-based alternative to tools like Lotus ScreenCam.

sudo apt-get install xvidcap

Istanbul


Istanbul is a desktop session recorder for the Free Desktop. It records your session into an Ogg Theora video file. To start the recording, you click on its icon in the notification area. To stop you click its icon again. It works on GNOME, KDE, XFCE and others. It was named so as a tribute to Liverpool's 5th European Cup triumph in Istanbul on May 25th 2005.

sudo apt-get install istanbul

Vnc2Flv


Vnc2flv is a cross-platform screen recording tool for UNIX, Windows or Mac. It captures a VNC desktop session (either your own screen or a remote computer) and saves as a Flash Video (FLV) file.

Wink


Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users. It requires GTK 2.4 or higher and unfortunately is just a freeware(could not find any source code for it).

Screenkast


Screenkast is a screen capturing program that records your screen-activities, supports commentboxes and exports to all video formats.

If you got any more suggestions, please drop the comment. :)