record-a-cast

Select and record a portion of your desktop

record-a-cast was created out of frustration for either poor UI, poor compatibility with Linux, or both. It's based on well-tested technologies (e.g. Electron, FFmpeg) so it should work well on most environments.

Demonstration

1) Select an area

2) Get a screencast

Donating

Support this project and others by twolfson via PayPal.

Requirements

• X11 server, FFmpeg requires this for its x11grab functionality
• npm, usually installed with Node.js
  • Used for installing dependencies
  • We recommend installing via: https://github.com/nodesource/distributions
• FFmpeg, used for recording the screen
  • This might be known as avconv on your distribution
  • For apt installation, this might be one of:
    • apt-get install ffmpeg
    • apt-get install libav-tools

Getting Started

1. Install the module globally via npm install -g record-a-cast

2. Start running record-a-cast via record-a-cast recording.mov

3. Select an area via a draggable/resizable window

4. Press Enter and FFmpeg will begin recording that area

5. To stop recording, send a keyboard interrupt to record-a-cast (typically Ctrl+C)

6. Your recording will be available at recording.mov

Documentation

CLI usage

Our CLI currently supports the following:

$ record-a-cast --help

  Usage: record-a-cast [options] <outfile> [-- ffmpeg-options]

  Options:

    -h, --help                  output usage information
    -V, --version               output the version number
    --delay <delay>             Milliseconds to wait before recording starts
                       (default: 50 to prevent visible overlays)
    --height-divisor <divisor>  Resize only to heights divisible by `m`
    --width-divisor <divisor>   Resize only to widths divisible by `n`

As noted, we support passing through options to FFmpeg via a -- delimiter. For example, we can pass -r 10 (record at 10FPS) to ffmpeg:

record-a-cast out.mov -- -r 10
# Invokes: /usr/bin/ffmpeg -video_size 20x20 -f x11grab -i :0+20,20 -y -r 10 out.mov

Environment variables

We support the following environment variables:

• FFMPEG_BIN String - Path to desired FFmpeg executable
  • By default, we will search for ffmpeg and avconv on PATH

Examples

Custom height/width divisors

On some computers, we can encounter errors like:

[libx264 @ 0x12f24c0] width not divisible by 2 (801x600)

These are caused by our codec requiring even heights/widths for its format. To work around this, we support snapping our selection to height/widths that are only even (e.g. 801 -> 802).

To run record-a-cast with snapping to even heights/widths, use:

record-a-cast --height-divisor 2 --width-divisor 2--out.mov

Custom framerate

When recording something like a GIF, we might want a reduced framerate to save on size and poor frame delays. Here's an example of recording a movie at 10FPS:

record-a-cast out.mov -- -r 10
# Invokes: /usr/bin/ffmpeg -video_size 20x20 -f x11grab -i :0+20,20 -y -r 10 out.mov

Duration

Sometimes we might want to only record for a few seconds. In this example, we will set our framerate to 24FPS and record for 3 seconds (72 frames).

record-a-cast out.mov -- -r 24 -frames 72
# Invokes: /usr/bin/ffmpeg -video_size 20x20 -f x11grab -i :0+20,20 -y -r 24 -frames 72 out.mov

# Compute duration dynamically in bash
# record-a-cast out.mov -- -r 24 -frames "$((3 * 24))"

Creating a GIF

Requirements:

• ImageMagick, image manipulation library which is much better at generating GIFs than FFmpeg
  • apt-get install imagemagick

Script:

# Record our screencast with a reduced framerate
# DEV: We use `-r 10` to output 10FPS since GIFs move slower
record-a-cast recording.mov -- -r 10

# Output each frame to a folder
# DEV: When we tried to record directly to PNGs via FFmpeg, they were all empty
#   Hence, this 2 step process
mkdir frames
ffmpeg -i recording.mov frames/recording%03d.png

# DEV: If you want to remove any frames from the final product
#   then navigate to `frames` and delete them

# Combine our frames into a GIF via ImageMagick
convert -loop 0 frames/recording*.png recording.gif

Want more variations on this? See the following links:

• https://gist.github.com/dergachev/4627207
• https://gist.github.com/SlexAxton/4989674

Contributing

In lieu of a formal styleguide, take care to maintain the existing coding style. Add unit tests for any new or changed functionality. Lint via npm run lint and test via npm test.

Unlicense

As of Mar 17 2016, Todd Wolfson has released this repository and its contents to the public domain.

It has been released under the UNLICENSE.