by jesse

This is actually just a clipboard for myself as I’m not very good at remembering bash commands I don’t use on a regular base.

recordmydesktop (http://recordmydesktop.sourceforge.net/) is a handy little tool to capture the desktop with audio. I just used it to create a small presentation of the wordpress engine.

If you wanna capture just a single window you need to know the window id:

xwininfo

will help you with that.

Now we can have fun:

recordmydesktop -windowid 0×1600040 –overwrite -o output.ogg

–overwrite because you’ll probably not have a perfect solution with the first try.
–nosound if you don’t wanna speak or have sound captioned.
Spare -windowid ### to capture the whole desktop.

By the way, if you wanna play it with, let’s say mplayer, you’ll need to compile it with theora support (+theora flag on –omg-optimized gentoo). VLC plays it out of the box.

So, I wanted to upload it on youtube. Of course they can’t handle that much of coolness so I had to convert it first:

mencoder output.ogg -o output.avi -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame

Again, change mp3lame to nosound if You want to.

Yay, and that’s it :)

Notes:
On my ~amd64 box I had to emerge it with ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~*” but it works really smooth. Sometimes it loses the audio source. Happened 1 of 3 times. And be careful with scrolling (on firefox for example).

Besides that it’s a really cool & handy tool :)