Screencasting in ArchLinux

Today I put some time in setting a screenrecording environment on my main machine. My idea is to record some screencasts of creating Domain-Specific Languages in textx.

For main screen recorder I choose SimpleScreenRecorder. It is simple, fast, easy to setup, and it is available in the binary repository so it is just a

sudo pacman -S simplescreenrecorder

away.

A nice addition to screencast is a small webcam image in the corner. I find a screencast more personal and appealing when I can actually see a presenter. I tried several webcam apps but all of them was to much for what I was trying to do. At the end I settled on xawtv. It is simple, no frills application that do just what I needed. It is also available in the binary repositories. After installation call it with

xawtv -c /dev/video0

I use KDE so it was fairly easy to remove border and put it on top of other windows so that is is always visible.

In addition, I enabled Zoom desktop effect so that I can zoom on the place where the mouse is.

Also, I installed screenkey application which is very useful if key presses are important for the presentation. This application will print all key presses in the overlay window. This application is not available in the binary repositories but it is on the AUR. So if you have yaourt installed it would be

yaourt -S screenkey

The end result is shown in the screenshot bellow and I hope that some screencasts will appear here shortly.