I had a suck time trying to get Screencasting on Ubuntu Feisty working but I managed to get it working without any code hacks once I got on the the right software and instructions. This tutorial ranks really high but has out of date information for my purposes.

This article was critical for getting my sound recording working easy on GTK Record My Desktop. My correct audio setting was hw:1,0 and not hw:0,0 - yours may be different so have a read because it explains things.

Anyway I’m up and running with recorded screencasting on Ubuntu with two opensource projects. GTK Record My Desktop (gtk-recordMyDesktop) and ffmpeg for converting.

This tutorial shows you how to convert your .ogg files to flash.

One funny thing with GTK Record My Desktop is you must first do these things.

  1. Configure your sound input properly.
  2. Click ‘Save As’ and name the file before recording (otherwise nothing gets saved).
  3. Select the screen area you’d like to record on the little panel on the left of the GTK Record My Desktop (if you don’t the rendered file will be corrupted)
  4. Get some software like ffmpeg to convert your movie to a flash file flv.
  5. I haven’t even checked for editing software to slice up your raw movies. Does this exist for Ubuntu?

Anyway check out these tutorials also.

ffmpeg can be a pain in the butt to install but I got it working. You need to also install lame and the lame development library if you want to convert ogg to flv with mp3 audio. Lame is the mp3 audio codec. ffmpeg doesn’t work without the lame development library also installed. You need to install the latest ffmpeg from source and make sure you enable mp3 at ./configure time. If you have already tried installing ffmpeg you may need to remove them all and start again. Alternatively you can try another directory.

This shows you how to set up ffmpeg in a new directory with mp3 support.

sudo su

apt-get -y update

apt-get install build-essential

apt-get install lame liblame0 liblame-dev

mkdir -p /home/YOURDIRECTORY/ffmpeg/src

cd /home/YOURDIRECTORY/ffmpeg/src

svn --force export svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg

cd ffmpeg

./configure --prefix=/home/YOURDIRECTORY/ffmpeg --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libogg

make

make install

cd /where-your-ogg-files-are/

/home/YOURDIRECTORY/ffmpeg/bin/ffmpeg -i test.ogg -vcodec flv -b 384000 -s 800x600 -r 6 -acodec libmp3lame -ar 22050 -ab 64 -pass 1 -passlogfile log-file test7.flv