For my screencasts I was using gtkrecordmydesktop since my first screencast and it did a good job. For quiet some time now I am experiencing issues with it were it stops recording my voice at some point during the session and I ended up with recording the audio again. This issue did not got solved after several updates and I started looking into other programs. I tried the following programs: istambul, xvidcap, eidete and kazam. The first three application I experienced more problems than with gtkrecordmydesktop so I dropped those fairly quickly and started playing with kazam.
After you installed kazam from launchpad you will see the following window.
As you can see you can enable/disable Audio and Video sources. let see the Video Source options in the next screenshot.
In case you have a multi-monitor setup like me you are able to select Display 1 or Display 2 or both combined. Lets look at the Audio options.
Even with the audio you have multiple choices. in my case I have installed a Logitech USB Microphone (AK5370), Logitech Webcam (QuickCam S5500) and you can also choose the audio card that is installed in your system. You can even add a second audio source to the recording options. Let’s have a look at the video codec options.
Kazam only comes with those two video codecs which is for the most cases sufficient. I personally would like to see also xvid and flash (swf). The other option I really like is the Countdown Timer and Frame Rate and my absolute favorite option is the Record Region without this option I probably would not have switched to kazam. Have a look at the next screenshot.
After you clicked on the record region button a grey shaded area appears and it’s set to 640×480 by default. Now you can use your mouse and re-scale the area by clicking and dragging one of those white squares on each corner. one more remark here, I would like to see some region templates to choose from like HD720 or HD1080 and also a option to re-locate the shaded area after you re-sized or chosen a region template but I am happy with the functionality that it offers. The last thing to do for you is to kick of the recording by clicking on the record button.
Now you are at the point were you probably like to finish your recording. Just click on the red square icon in the top menu bar next to the mail envelope and you will see the following option shown in the screenshot above.
You probably asking now how can I install Kazam? Thats easy too…just go to https://launchpad.net/kazam look for the section Where to get it? and click on the link for the Unstable PPA link, click on Technical details about this PPA, choose your Ubuntu version and copy and paste those two repository lines into your Software Sources in the apt sources config file. Just open up a terminal and enter
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
and paste those two lines to the end of the document. It appears that at this moment the stable release is only available for Ubuntu 12.04LTS but don’t worry the unstable version worked great for me. If you are interest in following the Kazam development Blog just click on this link http://www.twm-kd.com/category/linux/kazam/.
Let me know what you think about Kazam or if you found something better.