Screencasting is the process of taking a video capture of what’s happening on your screen. It is a great technique for doing tutorials, or explaining something you’re doing on the computer visually to someone when you’re not geographically close. In a sense, it’s like inviting someone to look over your shoulder at your computer screen, while you explain what’s going on.

There are tailor-made applications for both Windows and the Mac designed specifically for this purpose, but for a long time it has often been much more difficult to create a screencast such as this in Linux. recordMyDesktop changes that.

recordMyDesktop has both a command line tool, and graphical programs (for both GTK and Qt) which make screen capture really easy to do. The command line program is nice and intuitive, provided you’re reasonably proficient using the command line already, but the graphical program stands out for me and is the simplest way to quickly record a demo of your screen.

In a somewhat ironic twist, I’ve used recordMyDesktop to record a brief screencast on how to use recordMyDesktop, which you can view by clicking Watch Video.

I do want to mention and say thanks to heathenx for his help getting my video workflow for FOSSwire moved over to using recordMyDesktop and 100% open source tools. I also highly recommend his video tutorial, An Introduction to Screencasting in Linux which goes into a lot more detail and takes things a lot slower than I do in my video that accompanies this post.

recordMyDesktop is by far the best screencasting solution for Linux that I have used yet, and makes the capturing process a real breeze, especially compared to using older solutions such as xvidcap.