valibuk.net

The Ruby on Rails community has an interesting motto: Show, don’t tell. It is really worth to follow this idea, especially for tutorials or application pages. I usually look for links as Screenshots, Screencast or Demo on such pages — firstly you would like to see what a photo gallery looks like and then you will read instructions how to install it or how to change the background colour…

One of the mentioned presentations is a screencast. (Shortly: A record of everything what happened on your desktop (or its part) — window changes, keystrokes and mouse movements.)

How to create a screencast on Linux? There are applications such as xvidcap, vnc2swf, Istanbul and recordMyDesktop.

The main difference is the output format: mpeg (e.g. xvidcap), ogg (e.g. recordMyDesktop, Istanbul) or swf/flash (e.g. vnc2swf). The last one is probably the most suitable for Web (the majority of users already installed a Flash player). Although, I decided for an open standard: ogg.

recordMyDesktop is a command line application, but there is GUI: gtk-recordmydesktop.

On Gentoo, simply run: emerge recordMyDesktop gtk-recordmydesktop
Do not forget to compile the theora library (libtheora) with the encode flag.

Using of the application is intuitive, you can use it in 20 seconds :) I have not tried the sound recording yet.

Unfortunately the Select Window button did not work in the GUI (version 0.3.4), but there is a Select Area On Screen function in the context menu of the application icon in the system tray — with it you can quite easily select a window area.

I found a great manual how to play an ogg file on Wikipedia.

And here is an example from my rubyagent site.