I’ve periodically done screencasting and screen recording over the last few years — mostly while running Ubuntu or Debian — and it’s been an evolving pain to find a piece of GNU/Linux screen recording software that actually works. The one I’ve had the most success with is gtk-RecordMyDesktop, but it’s confusing to configure, and can be quite picky with audio sources… sometimes making it impossible to capture audio at all. There are other alternatives — byzanz, istanbul — that tend to be just as buggy or worse.
My current use case is slightly complicated: I’m doing Google Hangouts sessions with people using the web app I’ve been working on, and I want to record the video of them using it, their audio, and my audio. Basically, I want to record my user testing sessions — so far, without success, at least for audio.
The one promising project the last time I tried was Kazam, but it was still too buggy for me to use successfully. It looks like it’s in pretty good shape now… it lets me choose the window to record, and I can add audio from both sound from speakers and microphone, with human-readable pulldowns for which speaker device and which microphone device, and it worked successfully to record a Hangout. And, it has nice file format options (including VP8/webm, which is the best option for uploading to Wikimedia Commons).
Nice work, Kazam developers!
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