The tools

• ffmpeg

  (On Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install ffmpeg)

• gtk-recordmydesktop

  (On Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop)

• Jeroen Wijering’s embedded Flash player wizard (brilliant!)

The process

1. Record a screencast

Fire up gtk-recordmydesktop. The screen looks like this:

Optionally press “Select Window” and click on a window to select it for recording.

Press record, and do your thing.

By default, it saves the file as out.ogg in your home directory. (more info on the Ogg format).

2. Convert the .ogg to .flv

You need to convert this into a Flash .flv format. Easiest way is to use ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i out.ogg out.flv

or, optionally resize so that the output file will be 320×250:

ffmpeg -i out.ogg -s 320x250 out.flv

3. Upload the .flv to your site

Upload the new .flv to your site (and remember where you put it).

4. Use the embedded Flash player wizard

Then go to Jeroen Wijering’s embedded Flash player wizard. Paste the link to your newly uploaded .flv.

Double check that the file shows up in the preview of the wizard. When you’re happy with it, copy the source code shown in the wizard and paste it in your site.

A note on embedding in WordPress

Copying and pasting the code into the edit window for a post did not work properly at first in WordPress (even in the non-visual editor). The source code showed up as plain text. To fix this, I had to delete all the newlines so that the embed tag was all on one line.

#!/usr/bin/bash
for f in $(find -type f -iname '*.eps')
do
     dest=`echo ${f%.*}`
     echo "${f} to ${dest}.jpg"
     convert "${f}" "${dest}.jpg"
done