Rich Menga is PCMech's video guy, an author and part-time host of PCMech LIVE.The video format for screencasting in Linux Mint (as well as many other flavors of Linux) is Theora. While it’s cool that it’s freely available to use, posting OGG/OGM files to video sites like YouTube can be a pain.
On attempt to upload a direct from-Linux video OGG or OGM, YouTube rejected it every time, stating the video was too long even though it’s well under 3 minutes long (the longest allowed is 10 minutes).
If anyone from YouTube happens to read this, you guys gotta get better support for Theora format video.
So anyway, on to the good stuff. Here’s the video.
The amazing parts about this mini-screencast are:
- This was not Linux running in an emulator. All native.
- I was able to screencast at a full 1680×1050 resolution.
- The audio carried over easily and stayed in perfect sync with the video.
- All the 3D effects were captured. You see exactly what I was seeing when I was recording this.
- The video playing on one of the workspaces was directly from DVD in the Totem Player and not a file. This means true-blue streaming video was occurring while I was screencasting.
There is absolutely no way I could do a screencast like this in Windows or OS X. Not possible. This is a Linux-only thing.
Even for Camtasia, arguably the best screencasting software that exists, it can’t do what you see in the video above.
Yep. I’m impressed.
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1/29/2008 12:27 am
Good stuff. Next time, to overcome the encoding issue, setup recordmydesktop to output to out.ogg, then just create a text file with gedit, paste in this:
#! /bin/sh -f
cd /home/$USER/Desktop
mencoder -idx out.ogg -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -o output.mpg
Then save it as whatever.sh
From here, right click on the file, goto properties and make it executable.
Now double click the completed bash script, run it it terminal and boom - you are re-encoding into a YouTube acceptable format within Linux.
Oh, you may need to install mencoder first, however.
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1/29/2008 10:33 am
The only problem with using mencoder after creating the OGG is that the audio sync doesn’t mate up very well on the MPEG output - especially when it’s a big-res capture.
For the time being I use All to AVI (Windows) and it keeps the sync proper on conversion.
I’ve tried both ffmpeg and mp3lame with mencoder but I still get the out-of-sync audio result on conversion to MPEG format.
I’m crossing fingers All to AVI Linux dev gets a *nix version released. That would be way-cool.
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