new to ubuntu

I wanted to make a screencast that recorded my presentation slides and my voice.

First, I installed xvidcap through the Ubuntu Software Center. Xvidcap recorded the slides but would not record audio. I read the FAQ’s which said to adjust the mixer settings. I turned on the microphone and made sure that the mic levels were high enough. I was able to record my voice with Sound Recorder but I could not get xvidcap to record audio.

Then I installed PulseAudio Volume Control through the Ubuntu Software Center. This post recommends that you run xvidcap from the terminal window with the following command.

padsp xvidcap

When I did this, xvidcap recorded audio but it was choppy and garbled.

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Through System> Administration> Synaptic Package Manager, I installed RecordItNow. Search for “recordmydesktop” and mark all three results (recordmydesktop, gtk-recordmydesktop, and recorditnow) for installation. (I could not get recordmydesktop, another screencast program, to work; it crashed my computer.)

You can run the program by going to Applications> Sound & Video> RecordItNow.

I like how the program has a countdown (5 seconds) before recording starts. You can record the entire desktop or choose a portion of the screen to capture. To do this, you have to left-click on the icon with the square and upside-down triangle. You have to click this icon several times and then a gray box appears on your screen. Then you can resize the box to capture the portion of the screen you want.

With recorditnow I successfully recorded my presentation with audio. By default, it saves the file as .ogv and I uploaded the video to youtube without any problems.

I noticed that the audio and video are slightly out of sync so I had to pause a few seconds before and after I proceeded to the next slide. At the end of my presentation I had to pause about 10 seconds. If I stopped the recording immediately after I stopped talking the last few seconds would be cut off. Other than these minor problems, RecordItNow worked fine for me.