Screencast for Debian
Today I had toiled my entire day to find a good screencast tool for my Debian wheezy. This statement clearly shows there are not too many good tools out there.
The tools which I tried are
Recordmydestop: Easy to install but it doesn't have a pause button and output format is ogv which is quite huge
Screenkast: Tried to install and got stuck with the following error "checking for Qt... configure: error: Qt (>= Qt 3.2) (headers and libraries) not found. Please check your installation!" I did my level best to find the exact reason for it as I had already installed dev version of the package.
I also came across the commands like
apt-cache search qt |grep --color header to identify the exact package needed to install, this was something new to me.
But actually I was trying to install something that will work in KDE on a GNOME. Yes you are right screenkast works in KDE and not in Gnome.
xvidcap: This is pretty old one and its still trying to use oss dev/dsp device for input source of audio but in order to Pulse audio to process this you should use a wrapper called padsp to communicate it with pulse audio
#padsp xvidcap to remove the error and padsp is wrapper which will pass the old oss device and transparently bypasses it to pulse audio.
Some concepts learned
ALSA provides an API for sound card device drivers. It is part of the Linux kernel
OSS is the first sound system used in Linux but now it has been deprecated
Pulse Audio is a sound server
Kazam: I have tried to install using its ppa but unfortunately it didn't work. Then tried to install from source, it required python3.2 but again faced so many errors in python modules. The next option was to search to install from a thirdparty repo crunchbag
Followed these steps.
wget http://packages.crunchbang.org/statler-dev/crunchbang.key apt-key add crunchbang.key
Add these two source lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list deb http://packages.crunchbang.org/waldorf waldorf main deb-src http://packages.crunchbang.org/waldorf waldorf main
aptitude update aptitude install kazam
To get your mic working I chose Audio Source
Built in Audio Analog Stereo
All the three tools are now working, but I still have to decide one between xvidcap and kazam.