# RecordMyDesktop

recordMyDesktop is 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.

recordMyDesktop is a CLI tool but there are two GUI interfaces available, gtk-recordmydesktop and qt-recordmydesktop.

## Installation

The packages recordmydesktop, gtk-recordmydesktop and qt-recordmydesktop can be found in [community].

## Usage

The basic usage is not too hard and it provides a man page. Here is a simple example using jack for audio capture:

    $ recordmydesktop --use-jack system:capture_1

## Troubleshooting

Current versions behave weird and need strange parameters to work properly. Try this for non-choppy capture:

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

### Audio record is lagging

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.

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

    $ recordmydesktop --device plughw:0,0

2. 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 here.

### Audio record lags and is out of sync

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).

### Audio record is distorted (slower/graver)

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

### No sound with PulseAudio

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.

Just run it like:

    $ recordmydesktop --device pulse

## External Links

- recordMyDesktop Homepage
- using ffmpeg directly

Categories:

- X server
- Multimedia