Hi,

I want to share how I record screencasts for Pharocasts
http://pharocasts.blogspot.com/ in case someone wants to participate. Now
there's 11 screencasts. The difficult part is to have a good idea / scenario
for a screencast. Comments and ideas are welcome.

If you want to publish on Pharocasts I can give you write access. Or if you
have a "draft" screencast I can edit it / re-record it for publishing. I try
to record screencasts with a minimum duration of 5 mn.

These instructions are for Linux (but I'm a beginner in video stuff). I
don't know which software to use on other operating systems. Have advices ?

I record with xvidcap http://xvidcap.sourceforge.net/. I define a capture
zone of 800x600 (use 4:3 or 16:9 standard resolution. If not you can have
poor encoding results).
Set multi-frame mode (you have to right-click on the file button to access
preferences, not very intuitive).
I choose AVI format / MPEG 4 codec.
If you open / close applications for the screencast, note that KDE has very
good options to memorize / force windows positions, so they are always
opened in your capture zone.(Other window managers like E17 have these sort
of options).
The trick is to not stop recording when you write errors, you can cut the
"wrong" parts later.

To edit the video, I use avidemux http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/. It has
Qt and Gtk GUI and work on Linux / Windows / OSX / BSD ..... It's really
easy to use. When you want to cut a part, you define the beginning with the
A button ( Ctrl-[ ), the end with B button ( Ctrl-] ), then Edit -> Cut (
Ctrl-X ). You can navigate using arrow keys.
When finished, click on save (Choose another filename !!).

So now you have your screencast in .mpeg file. Note that people using MacOSX
Tiger or older have problems to watch this video. So I convert in .mov using
ffmpeg http://www.ffmpeg.org/ like this:
ffmpeg -i my_video.mpeg -b 500k my_video.mov.

(but I think it's not the best command as the video size is bigger and
quality lower).

To publish the video I use Vimeo http://vimeo.com/. I've tried YouTube and
Daily Motion but the quality is lower or the video duration is limited. I
had problems using the "standard uploader", so I switch to the "basic
uploader" on the download page, works better.

It's really fun to record screencasts, and a good way to show development
practices.

Cheers,

Laurent Laffont
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