Vokoscreen: A new screencasting tool for Linux

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The last few years, many users upload their how-to videos (also known as videorials — like tutorials) in Youtube, showing their Linux desktop and explaining how to do a bunch of stuff. So instead of reading an article or a guide with static images and multiple pages, maybe there is a quick educational video waiting for you somewhere in the Internet. There are several tools who help you to do this job, like Kazam and Record-My-Desktop but, both of them are not as expected.

Vokoscreen is a new application that helps you to record your Linux desktop. It’s very simple and it uses a minimalistic GUI.

Even though it is a new application (let’s say in beta phase), it manages to record your desktop (zoom in or zoom out) efficiently. Furthermore, it can capture your face using a webcam in the same time, so this feature is especially suitable for screencasting purposes. Truth to be told, there are many things yet to be fixed and optimized in Vokoscreen, but it surely worths your attention.

The application is available in GitHub, while Ubuntu-related distros (like Mint) have their own repository.

ppa:vokoscreen-dev/vokoscreen

Type following commands in terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vokoscreen-dev/vokoscreen
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vokoscreen 

Vokoscreen is very simple to use, thanks to its minimalistic GUI. It basically uses FFMPEG. Take a look at the following demonstration:

Download YouTube Video | YouTube Converter

Vokoscreen provides you with an easy click-and-capture way of doing your screencasting. But, if you are up to screencast your gaming experience then you are probably going to have some FPS-drop problems. This is not because of ffmpeg, but because of your computer hardware. You need a monster PC in order to screencast in full HD and play your game smoothly in full graphics. For my system (Intel Core i5 2500K overclocked up to 4.8GHz) I used this command:

ffmpeg -f alsa -i pulse -f x11grab -s 1920×1080 -i :0.0 -c:a libmp3lame -ab 128k -ac 2 -c:v mpeg2video -qscale:v 0 amnesia_mpeg_0.avi

Let me show you my experiment results using mpeg4 and Amnesia via Steam (please watch it in 1080p in fullscreen):

Download YouTube Video | YouTube Converter

In my system, this is the best I can do for gamecasting purposes, thus H.264 needs a lot of more horsepower.

I hope you find this article useful and do some screencasting video as well;)

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