Screencasting

Goal

Prepare educational screencasts. Primary content - a single virtual terminal window, human speech.

Thoughts

It would be great if I could encode whatever happens in my window in an efficient way. After all, it's just text. No fonts, just color and boldness. It should be an open codec. It should also display cursor.

Software

Requirements

• runs on FreeBSD
• free
• open-source
• outputs to an open format
• output format watchable on Windows
• supports background audio
  • interleaved for good sync
  • preferably ogg, mp3 or arbitrary codec

List

Bitmap

• xvidcap
  • depends on ffmpeg+swscale which is not in ports atm
  • slow
  • capturing separate frames is very slow
• vlc (screen://)
  • crashes
• istanbul
• recordmydesktop
  • very cool
  • could only get audio through jack
  • operates on updates via xdamage
• ffmpeg+x11grab
  • needed to tweak the port
  • works fine, maybe slower than RMD

X11

• xnee
  • hmm

VNC

• vncrec
• vnc2swf
• http://cyberelk.net/tim/software/rfbproxy/
• http://ttt.uni-trier.de/ttt.en.html

TTY

• ttyrec - http://0xcc.net/ttyrec/
• termplay
• http://alt.org/nethack/ttyrecscreen.php
• very promising

Text

• Ogg Writ
• subtitles

Links

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screencast
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screencasting_software