A video recording of your screen or desktop can be greatly useful when trying to explain some steps to someone, or showing off your Minesweeper skills. All you need is a screen capture tool like Istanbul. It can be downloaded from: The Istanbul homepage or its Linuxappfinder listing. Istanbul should be also be available on the repositories of all major distros. To install Istanbul on Fedora, open the terminal and type:

su -c 'yum install istanbul -y'

Or you can use the package manager [System » Administration » Add/Remove Software]. Ubuntu users might want to refer to the community documentation.


Fig: The Package Manager

Once installed, run it. It shows up as a red dot in the task-bar. Right clicking it brings up the options and configuration menu, and left clicking it starts the recording. You can select an area or window to record, or record your whole screen. Some basic scaling options are also available.


Fig: Taskbar Icon


Fig: Options Menu

To stop recording, click the icon again. The application will then prompt you to save the screencast. Istanbul currently saves to Ogg Theora format only. The saved video can be played back on VLC media player.


Fig: Save Options

Sharing the Screencast

Dailymotion is the only major video sharing site that supports direct Ogg Theora upload and sharing. Youtube and the others transcode it to propitiatory formats. But that should hardly matter, since the end result achieved either way. There is also a HTML < video > tag. Ogg Therora video is supported via the Video tag in Firefox and Opera. Here is a short sample screen cast in which I use Linear's SPICE simulator to demonstrate a series positive clipper circuit.