For a long time, I was looking for a video capture software for GNU/Linux. From time to time, I look on the web to see if there are improvements in this field. A recent NewsForge article triggered my curiosity, one more time …

If you accept proprietary formats, you can use vnc2swf : your film will be in Flash format, a proprietary format. Also based on VNC, there is vncrec that produces its own video format (this one seems to be free and easily exported with transcode).

If you don’t have VNC and are working with KDE and don’t like proprieraty formats, the recently released ScreenKast could be very helpful. This software is written by a Belgian (cocorico!) and captures your screen in a video. Supported formats are FFmpeg ones. This NewsForge article explains a little bit about ScreenKast.

But, if you don’t have VNC nor play with KDE, xvidcap can help you. And, finally, if you are working with Gnome, Istanbul is a rather new project but some parts seems to be working. If I have time this week-end, I will install it on my Fedora Core 5.

Now I think GNU/Linux has some decent screen recording software 🙂

Some tutorials:

• vnc2swf Linux.com tutorial
• LinuxGazette tutorial for vncrec and vnc2swf
• Screening using Fedora (5 with Istanbul and Byzanz)
• Making Screen-Capture Movies (just in order to show that one doesn’t need dedicated software: ImageMagick can do it for you!)
• Two years ago, NewsForge reviewed some screen capture systems

• Open Source