I recently made my first screencast (post below), and I must admit it
wasn't that easy to find the right tools and the right method to make a
nice screencast on Linux. I found some solutions, and I'm going to
share them here.
Feel free to fit this to your environment.
Choosing your software
There are several software for screencasting, the most known ones being
xvidcap,
Istanbul and
recordMyDesktop.
I've chosen recordMyDesktop because it was less CPU-greedy and it provided
a clean and easy to use command-line interface.
However, recordMyDesktop has a little problem (which wasn't embarrassing for
my screencast): the audio track lags a little bit, and when you make a very
long video, it may become audible.
Preparing your desktop
This is the most tricky part. Since you don't want to record your whole
desktop (at least for that kind of screencast), you will have to use your
favorite WM's features (and by favorite, I mean OpenBox). This is also an important point if
you want to minimize post-processing (so much that the video for my
screencast hasn't been post-processed at all).
First, shrink you windows so they take a reasonable amount of space (640×480
is a good idea) and stack them so they are all at the same coordinates. Use
xprop to get the window ID of one of them.
Then add something like that to your OpenBox rc.xml:
Now launch an URxvt with urxvt -name rxvt-invisible. You'll get
a terminal that doesn't show when you cycle windows with Alt-Tab.
This is pretty useful because it will stay out your way and won't mess with
your workflow.
Launch recordMyDesktop in that terminal, giving the window ID you grabbed
earlier, and start your screencast!
Once you're finished, just ^C in the terminal to stop
recordMyDesktop and start the encoding.
Publish your video
I've chosen Vimeo as an
hosting platform, simply because it rocks. If you want to follow the
guidelines, chances are that you need to convert your video. I used
mencoder to do that, by setting the right -lavcopts
(look at the man page) in order to get an H.264 video with AAC sound.
Once this this done, simply go to Vimeo, register for an account if it's not
already done and follow the uploading process.
Questions, remarks, etc.: the comment link is just below!
Voici mon premier screencast, dans lequel j'explique (du moins j'essaye)
comment réaliser un petit service de réduction d'URL et de bookmarking
en un petit quart d'heure à l'aide de CouchDB et Sinatra.
As you may have noticed if you're not reading this in your feed reader,
the design has changed quite a bit!
I’m happy to announce that I just released
Honk,
in it's 0.2 version !
I finally found the bug that caused comments to make Honk crash, and it
should be fixed now! Therefore, comments are now open again.
There are a lot of changes and bug fixes, the simplest way is to read the
changelog
I've still got plenty of ideas to make Honk better, and it obviously need
a lot more work to be really nice. Stay tuned!
Tags:
honk, misc
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Posted on Wed May 27 17:25:00 +0200 2009
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0 comments
I discovered tircd yesterday, and almost
immediately decided to use it.
I used to have a ttytter running
in a screen on my dedicated server, but ttytter has an awful user interface,
if we can call this an interface. It’s features are certainly cool, but
tircd has even nicer ones!
With tircd, I can use the best text interface that exists, namely
irssi.
Installing tircd on Debian (squeeze) is as easy as
sudo apt-get install tircd. Once it’s done, just run $ tircd to launch
the server and connect your irssi to localhost:6667.
I decided to start a second irssi, with the --home option set to ~/.twirrsi
so I can keep IRC separated from Twitter.
Having irssi as your Twitter client allows a LOT of things (logging,
highlights,…) and tircd has some awesome features like groups and search.
If you like text-based interfaces and/or if you are a screen lover,
I recommend you this very nice piece of software!
Since there were spam bots posting on this blog, I had to disable comments
for each post. I still don’t know why but this spam caused Honk to raise
a lot of errors.
I’m investigating on this bug and I’ll try to fix that as soon as possible.
Almost a month since that last post. Well, I’ve been really busy at college.
We’ve got so many projects to do: two GUI projects (an identikit portrait
editor and a Klondike game in, respectively, GTK and X11), and an
algorithmics project to compute railway itineraries (shortest paths,
clustering, generators,…). All of it is in C, which I’m not that
comfortable with so it’s kinda tricky :-P.
I didn’t have much time to work on Honk, but
I’ve improved other things a bit.
Jumpr which is a small tool to jump from a
directory to another has two nice new features:
Adding a mark without telling the target uses “.” as the target
Marks must now match /(?:\w|[_-])+/, and adding a portion of a path
when you jump adds it to the resulting folder. For exemple, if foo
resolves to /home/foo, then using $ j foo/bar will jump into /home/foo/bar (provided bar exists of course)
I’ve also done a small auto-test script
that uses notify-send and which is… well, very basic. I’ll have to change
it since I’m now going to use the lovely
Bacon testing framework that I just
discovered this afternoon.
I’ve been away from blogging for a bit of time because the various blogging
engines I used didn’t fulfill my needs, so I decided to write my own one.
This blog is powered by Honk, a small
(< 1000 LOC) Sinatra-powered engine.
Honk uses YAML files to store its posts and comments and is easily
configurable to suit your needs.
I know the default theme (the one you can see right now) is not looking really
good, but I’ll make another one for this blog :-)
This blog will, obviously, talk about code and web stuff, so stay tuned for
further postings.
For my french readers, I’ll setup another blog where I’ll be posting in my
mother tongue.
Tags:
misc
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Posted on Wed Mar 25 00:05:00 +0100 2009
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0 comments