RecordMyDesktop

Home page: http://recordmydesktop.sourceforge.net/

Recordmydesktop consists of three main programs, recordmydesktop is a command line tool with gtk-recordmydesktop and qt-recordmydesktop as the graphical frontends for GTK and QT environments.

Installation

Recordmydesktop has been added to the universe repository, and so can be installed easily:-

$ sudo apt-get install recordmydesktop gtk-recordmydesktop

For KDE

$ sudo apt-get install recordmydesktop qt-recordmydesktop

Usage

You can use recordmydesktop from the GUI (gtk-recordmydesktop) or control recordmydesktop directly from the commandline.

GUI

Once installed gtk-recordmydesktop can be launched from Applications -> Sound & Video. You can record by either left-click the icon in the panel or click the record button in the main window. For additional details on the Main Window see here,and the Panel(tray) Icon see here. If you do not want to capture the entire desktop there are three ways of selecting the area on which you will confine the recording.

1. Using the preview thumbnail on the main window you can draw a window with the crosshairs.
2. Using the “Select Window” button and then select a window on your desktop.

3. Using the “Select Area on Screen” function accessed by right-clicking on the panel icon. Additional details on defining an area for recording
   

Command Line

You can get details about using recordmydesktop by viewing the man page. An example command would be:

recordmydesktop --width 640 --height 480 -x 200 -y 200 --full-shots --fps 15   --channels 1 --device hw:0,0 --v_quality 63 --s_quality 10 --v_bitrate 2000000   --delay 10

Tips: Switch off sound recording with the "--nosound" option to reduce CPU overhead.