A quick update: a while back we wrote about 'fixing' the GTK-RecordMyDesktop videos for uploading to YouTube and other video sharing websites. Well, I don't know what did it but today when I've recorded a video with GTK-RecordMyDesktop and uploaded it to YouTube, it worked with no further tweaking (using Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat with up-to-date packages). What's sure is that it wasn't because of GTK-RecordMyDesktop as there were no recent updates to this applications.

As a sample video, see the PyWO video (it has been recorded with GTK-RecordMyDesktop and uploaded as an .ogv to YouTube).

If you ever tried to record your desktop using GTK-RecordMyDesktop (it's probably the same using the KDE front-end but I didn't test that), you've probably noticed the video doesn't work on YouTube or it's rendered very badly. The same issue occurs when trying to open the video in a video editor.

RecordMyDesktop is a desktop screencasting software application for Linux. It comes with different GUIs for Qt, GTK, KDE (RecorditNow).

RecordMyDesktop had a problem (actually it still does): a libtheora update broke it and it no longer works, making the video unplayable, even with VLC. However, there is a fix for this (the video will work in VLC and can be uploaded to YouTube, etc.): adding the "--v_bitrate 2000000" paramterer. Here is how to use it:

RecordMyDesktop is a program that captures audio and video from your desktop (Linux) which you can use to record you screen either just a portion of it or full-screen.

The latest version in Ubuntu is 0.3.7.2 but RecordMyDesktop already reached version 0.3.8.1 so if you want to upgrade it, you can download the Ubuntu .deb files from here. To build it from source, just follow this link.

Here are the changes:

/*Version 0.3.8.1*/
* Fixed a bug that caused compilation to fail on some platforms,
due to missing headers. * Minor code refactoring to assist
maintainability and portability of the program.
/*Version 0.3.8*/
* Extensive refactoring and cleanups of the code from Martin Nordholts.
* Cursor-flickering bug has been fixed, by Martin.
* Improved consistency on the format of the commandline options
and updated the manpage to reflect the changes (also by Martin ;) ).
* Applied patch by Luca Bonavita, that corrects the rgb
to yuv algorithm and provides near perfect colorspace conversion
(fixes bug #1961505)
* Compositing Window managers are now recognised through the _NET_WM_CM_Sn
hint instead of a simplistic namelist (which means that dual-mode wm's
like kwin or yet uknown ones will be handled correctly).
* Changed the way Jack support is offered, from dlopening at runtime to
normal linking at compilation.
* other minor changes and bugfixes.

Changelog Gtk-RecordMyDesktop:

/*VERSION 0.3.8*/
* nl.po added Dutch translation by Jos Poortvliet
* Applied patch by freedo, to Replace GtkFileSelection with
GtkFileChooserDialog.
* Synced to recordMyDesktop 0.3.8 (new format of options).