Activities/Screencast

Background

Screencast is a video screen capture utility. It is based on Recordmydesktop by John Varouhakis. It captures the screen to a video file which is in Ogg-Theora-Vorbis file format.

Where to get it

It can be downloaded from http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/screencast/Screencast-1.xo

Does the .xo mean that it will only work on OLPC machines? Anyone tested this on a standard Intel CPU? SoaS?

Status

It is thought to be buggy but the following patch has allowed video to be saved to the Journal. Open Terminal and change to directory /home/olpc/Activities/Screencast.activity and replace the file pippy_app.py with this file (renamed to pippy_app.py)

(it would be a good idea to backup the existing file first, eg mv pippy_app.py pippy_app.bak)

(help on replacing the file Activity_Team/Modifing_an_Activity#Editing)

The Screencast application

The Journal listing three saved videos

Running from the command line

Just download as above, you dont need to patch it. Open Terminal and change to directory /home/olpc/Activities/Screencast.activity and start the recordmydesktop program from the command line.

  cd Activities/Screencast.activity
  ./recordmydesktop

press ctrl c to terminate recording, wait for processing to complete and then copy the video to the journal

  copy-to-journal out.ogv -m video/ogg

The video is now saved in the journal and can be played by clicking on it.

The manual is helpful reading.

(The meaning of the -m flag is to set the Mime type 1 2 3 to video/ogg )

questions

Any chance that we can get a screencast of this arcane process? I feel like there a lot of steps taken for granted here.

yes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFWOXgDBUjk