Saturday, March 05, 2011

Desktop Capture to Video file tool for Ubuntu (xvidcap)

I installed xvidcap like so: System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Man...

2 comments:

  1. For the common no-sound problem:

    1. Uninstall xvidcap in Synaptic
    2. Install xvidcap from http://sourceforge.net/projects/xvidcap/files/xvidcap/1.1.7/xvidcap_1.1.7jaunty_i386.deb/download
    3. Lock the installed version in Synaptic
    4. Install pavucontrol in Synaptic (Needed in Ubuntu 10.04 but not in Linux Mint 10: already present)
    5. Open the program with padsp xvidcap
    6. Click on the recording button (red circle)
    7. Run pavucontrol, go to the Recording tab and there choose Monitor of Analog Stereo Internal Audio

    Done!!

    To record with sound, the program has always to be run with padsp xvidcap (for example from ALT+F2). To run it always like that from the menu: run alacarte, go to Sound and video, then to XVidCap Screen Capture, Properties and where it says Command put padsp xvidcap.

    The stated is to record the system sound, that is, the one coming out of the speakers, that can be of a song or movie of our hard drive or pendrive played by Totem, of a Flash music video of a website played by Firefox, ...

    Nevertheless, sometimes it can be necessary to record the microphone sound, for example if we want to make a videotutorial to explain how a program works. In this case we put xvidcap in recording state, run pavucontrol and in the Recording tab we put Analog Stereo Internal Audio (without "Monitor of" ahead).

    If we only want to record sound (without video) we can run from ALT+F2 gnome-sound-recorder. The first time probably it will be configured to record from the microphone. To record the system sound we run with ALT+F2 gnome-volume-control, go to the Hardware tab and in Profile we put Analog Stereo Output (it's also possible to do this running pavucontrol and using the Configuration tab).

    But when we finish we have to put again Analog Stereo Duplex in the Profile of Hardware of gnome-volume-control (or of Configuration of pavucontrol), so we can still choose the origin of the sound when recording with xvidcap.

    Another option, not to have to change once and again between Analog Stereo Duplex and Analog Stereo Output neither limit the sound source for xvidcap, is to leave Analog Stereo Duplex and use also gnome-sound-recorder with padsp ahead, that is, run padsp gnome-sound-recorder. Like the stated for padsp xvidcap, to change where we want to record the sound from, we put the program recording, open pavucontrol and in the Recording tab we put the desired option. We also can change the menu entry if we want with alacarte, going to Sound & video, then to Sound Recorder and then to Properties.

    NB: sometimes, to change from Analog Stereo Duplex to Analog Stereo Output it may be necessary to change first to Off, close, open again and then change finally to Analog Stereo Output. The same for the opposite change. If not, the computer may "not notice" that we have applied the change.

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    To install it in a x86_64 system I just have to use the --force-architecture option to the dpkg -i command.

    user@host:~/Desktop$ sudo dpkg --force-architecture -i xvidcap_1.1.7jaunty_i386.deb

    But when trying to run it I see that there are some i386 libraries missing. In order to easily install them I use the getlibs script.

    user@host:~/Desktop$ padsp xvidcap
    xvidcap: error while loading shared libraries: libtheora.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

    user@host:~/Desktop$ getlibs /usr/bin/xvidcap
    --------------------------------------------
    About getlibs: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=474790

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  2. Improvement of a comment: Please replace the paragraph starting with "Another option" with:

    Another option, not to have to change once and again between Analog Stereo Duplex and Analog Stereo Output neither limit the sound source for xvidcap, is to leave Analog Stereo Duplex and use also pavucontrol when we want to change the source of the sound for gnome-sound-recorder. Like the stated for padsp xvidcap, to change where we want to record the sound from, we put gnome-sound-recorder recording, open pavucontrol and in the Recording tab we put the desired option. In this case there is no need to use padsp (xvidcap needs it because it was designed for OSS. What padsp does is to connect OSS with PulseAudio, as shown in http://linux.die.net/man/1/padsp).

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