Recording a screencast in Linux

Screencasts

A picture is worth a thousand words.

And what if you want to make it even better? What about using an animated image to show some action or progress? Like this one:

Personally I like the animated images on the main project pages at GitHub. See for example git-plus or color-picker Atom plugins. (Or my build-rake plugin displayed above.)

The question is how to record such screencasts?

Screen Recording in Linux

There are several tools for Linux which can be used for screen recording. It also depends it you want to create a standard video file (e.g. for uploading to youtube) or an animated image which can be embedded into web pages.

Standard Video

For recording the desktop to a standard video file (like in AVI or WEBM format) you can use the ffmpeg tool.

To record the screen with audio capture (via PulseAudio) to a WebM file (using open codecs VP9 for video and Opus for audio) use command like this:.

ffmpeg -f pulse -i default -video_size x -framerate 15 -f x11grab -i :0.0+<width>,<height> -b:v 1M -crf 10 output.webm

See these links for more details:

• https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Capture/Desktop
• https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/VP8
• https://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-devices.html#x11grab
• http://www.lxtips.com/2011/07/single-window-screen-capture-script.html

Animated Image

If you want to create an animated image you need to use the GIF image format (you could use an animated PNG as well, but that is not supported by all browsers).

You could use ffmpeg as well (just use output.gif file name), but in my tests the resulting image is too big for using on web pages. It's probably caused by the fact that ffmpeg uses dithering for images with 24bit colors which obviously leads to less compression. Maybe there are some options to tune this, but still writing the position of the recorded area manually is a bit uncomfortable...

Then I found the byzanz tool. It's by default available to install in the openSUSE distribution, simply run:

sudo zypper in byzanz xwininfo

(This will also install xwininfo package, see later why.)

Now you can record the desktop in a similar way like ffmpeg, see the accepted parameters:

byzanz-record --help

Again, you need to manually enter the coordinates of the recorded area if you do not want to record complete screens. And that's not trivial... Fortunately I found this nice byzanz-record-window helper script.

You can install it locally via these commands:

cd ~/bin
wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/lucy/3042755/raw/eda2b85b51779affbc392a2bb3f1b60ed5fe98ff/byzanz-record-window
chmod a+x byzanz-record-window

The script uses the xwinfo helper to obtain the coordinates of the selected window. They are then passed to the byzanz-record tool.

I'd suggest to use about 3 second delay before starting the actual recording to have some time to get ready (switch to the correct window, position the mouse cursor, etc...).

So the final recording command would look like this:

byzanz-record-window --delay=3 --duration=5 screencast.gif

Final Notes

Be prepared to repeat the recording several times, you'll probably need more than a single attempt. I also found it easier to repeat the recording than editing and rebuilding the animation just to remove the useless parts at the beginning or the end.

Check also the resulting image size, for embedding into web pages it should be as small as possible. If it is too big then decrease the window size, do a shorter recording or avoid too many changes in the image.