recordMyDesktop is a screencasting software for X. It can record audio through ALSA, OSS or the JACK audio server. It is able capture through jack and thus is important for pro-audio video tutorials. recordMyDesktop only outputs to Ogg using Theora for video and Vorbis for audio.

Install the recordmydesktop package.

The basic usage is simple and a man page (recordmydesktop(1)) is provided. Here is a simple example using jack for audio capture:

$ recordmydesktop --use-jack system:capture_1

Current versions behave weird and need strange parameters to work properly. Here is an example that should help achieve non-choppy capture:

$ recordmydesktop --use-jack system:capture_1 --v_bitrate 2000000

If it appears that you have lags (error message when starting from the shell: Broken pipe: Overrun occurred) in your audio record (often with Intel onboard cards) then it might help to change the audio device. This can be done in two ways.

• Assuming that the terminal version is used then recordmydesktop should be started with:

  $ recordmydesktop --device plughw:0,0

• If a GUI is used then you can change the device from DEFAULT to plughw:0,0 in the audio tab of the settings.

More information on this issue can be found in this blog post.

Using the plughw:0,0 device as described above may work partially for some Intel cards. You might try:

$ recordmydesktop --device plughw:0,0 --freq 22050 --channels 2

It seems the trick was to specify the correct number of channels generated by the input source (in this case, a stereo mic).

This happens at least with Rode Podcaster USB Microphone, and can be fixed by setting the frequency to 45000:

$ recordmydesktop --device plughw:2,0 --freq 45000 --channels 2

This is pretty simple, but should be better explained. If recordmydesktop exits like this:

Couldn't open PCM device hw:0,0
Error while opening/configuring soundcard hw:0,0
Try running with the --no-sound or specify a correct device.

Install the package alsa-plugins and then run it like:

$ recordmydesktop --device pulse

• Wikipedia:RecordMyDesktop
• using ffmpeg directly