Recap of: “KDE4 built-in screencast for desktop recording“.

A little while ago I made a post about how to get video screen captures of KDE4 via the built in screencast features of Kwin, well having tried with the “captury” format screen captures a few times and following a tip-off I’ve decided it’s actually infinitely easier to use the latest KDEnlive.

Captury appears to have moved around quite abit recently but seems to be kept at code.ninchens.net for the time being. Thankfully all you need in [K|X]Ubuntu is the cpsrecode binary from the capseo package in the apt repos.

KDEnlive vs. KDE4 “desktop effects” video capture

KDEnlive then operates as a frontend for recordMyDesktop (in respect of video screen captures at least) and so is like using krecordmydesktop, except in that once you’ve finished (and waited for KDEnlive to encode your video) you can edit the video right there and then. Slick.

Upgrading recordMyDesktop from source files

Looking at the changelog for recordMyDesktop 0.3.8 (not the sparse release notes on SF.net!) I noticed that a refactoring and some optimisations for compositing window managers had been made and so decided on an upgrade over the 0.3.7 version offered for Kubuntu Intrepid (8.10).

A quick bit of configure, make, checkinstall later and I’m wondering why I’m getting this error:

checking for XDamageQueryExtension in -lXdamage... no
configure: error: Can't find libXdamage

When it looks like a dependency error so I had a look for Xdamage and it was installed fine, but I noticed that ldconfig -p | grep damage didn’t return “libXdamage.so” which is usually a pointer to the latest library. Addition of two such files in /usr/lib and /usr/lib32, eg:

pandfi@bridgeflap:/usr/lib$ sudo ln -s libXdamage.so{.1,}

appear to fix the problem and configure passed.

However make now failed:

rmd_poll_events.c:37:36: error: X11/extensions/Xdamage.h: No such file or directory

appearing now to show that the header files were missing. I thought probably they would be in a “dev” or “src” download that I hadn’t got and so I installed apt-file (on a tip off from reading the manual!) and used that to check on where to find Xdamage.h (which “locate damage” had confirmed was not on my system). Running apt-file confirmed my suspicion about a dev package:

"pandfi@bridgeflap:/usr/local/src/recordmydesktop-0.3.8.1$ apt-file search Xdamage.h
libxdamage-dev: /usr/include/X11/extensions/Xdamage.h

so I went ahead with “sudo apt-get install libxdamage-dev” and then tried again with “make”.

Checkinstall

Last couple of commands now, “checkinstall -D” made the package in the local directory and it was then installed using “sudo dpkg -i ./recordmydesktop_0.3.8.1-1_amd64.deb” … so now on to using it with KDEnlive!

KDEnlive or krecordmydesktop

KDEnlive makes use of the recordmydesktop binary but it doesn’t make clear the setings it uses. If you chooose to run an alternate front-end like krecordmydesktop then you’ll find you need to mess around with the settings a little to get the best from it, though the defailts work fine. kRecordMyDesktop creates an .ogg file and capture the sound and screen very well for me.