Videos

So, I've been working on making screencapture/narration videos, and after a bit of effort I got it to work. I used recordmydesktop, and it does most of what I want. My main gripe with it is that th e audio is soft on it, and it is unclear how to boost it. Another problem encountered is that it saves the files as ogg/theora video files, which crash the video player if the resolution chosen is too large. The files it creates are fairly large.

I did do some transcoding, the lab machines can not handle 1024x768 resolution, so I used

vlc -I dummy out.ogg vlc:quit --sout "#transcode{vcodec=theo,scale=0.75}:duplicate{dst=std{access=file,mux=ogg,dst=\"three.ogg\"}}"

to change the size and

mencoder out.ogg -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -o full.avi

to change the container to avi.

I know I could probably use transcode directly, but these worked well enough and was faster to find.

I tried audacity for podcasts and it seems pretty cool. I had problems getting the playback configured, but the recording went well.

Update: 9/26
some students had problems with it, so I am trying the following two encodings
mencoder loan_spreadsheet_1280x768.ogg -o loan_spreadsheet_1280x768.flv -of lavf -oac mp3lame -lameopts br=192 -af lavcresample=22050 -srate 22050 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=flv:vbitrate=2000:autoaspect:mbd=2:trell:v4mv -lavfopts i_certify_that_my_video_stream_does_not_use_b_frames

there also is a scaling option -vf scale=640:480 that I didn't use, but the example I found did.

and
mencoder loan_spreadsheet_1280x768.ogg -ovc xvid -oac mp3lame -o out.avi -xvidencopts bitrate=687


I had wanted to include a quicktime version, but the codec isn't on this machine.