Saturday, February 14, 2009

Linux Screencast!

Yesterday, I talked about LinuxTube and how this site features some outstanding videos of Linux desktops in action.

How do they capture these Linux desktops on video in first place? Well, there are a few different programs which video-capture every move of your Linux system's desktop. The first is XVidCap. I didn't use this one, so I cannot comment on how it performs. The second is KRecordMyDesktop. This was very easy to use and quite straightforward in setting up and initializing. But it lacked a few features I really wanted.

The third program is the one I really enjoyed using. It's called Istanbul. Istanbul allows you to capture the entire desktop, a portion of the desktop, or individual windows. It also allows you to reduce the size of the video frame by 1/4 or 1/2.

In the screencast example I've posted above, I'm used Istanbul and set it to capture a section of my desktop. I also reduced the video frame size by 1/2. Istanbul was easy to install. I simply went up to the Linux Mint repository and typed in Istanbul. The program came up in the listing, I toggled it for download and installation and a few minutes later, I was able to create the video you see.

(In the screencast example above, I'm using the multiple panes mode in Konqueror to move files. I talked about this feature in this blog post.)

If you'd like to see more information on these Linux video capture programs, check out this video on LinuxTube.

Get Linux. Then get Istanbul and show the world your Linux desktop!

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