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A Simple Screen Recorder for Ubuntu: Kazam

Screen recording is a great way to reach your audience (especially if you're ugly like me and don't wanna share your "face" :D). For instance, let's say that I wanted to show-off the new features in the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10. Then rather than writing a painfully long article, I can create a simple screen-record of my entire desktop which would explain a lot, easily.

Although if you use Ubuntu, then yet it doesn't come with a one pre-installed (it probably never will since screen recorder is not something that not everyone will use) but I'm pretty sure there are a lot you can find.

But if you've been looking for a very simple screen recorder that does nothing else (you know, without advanced video editing, cropping, etc) then Kazam is an excellent little tool.


Main features...

*. It's written in the GTK+ tool kit and uses the ffmpeg multimedia library for the recordings.

*. You can record both video (from your Computer screen of course) + an audio channel if you wanna add a voice as well.

*. Once you push the "Record" button it'll start to record whatever is on your desktop screen and you can use it's icon that runs in the notification area to Pause or Stop the recording.


*. As said, it doesn't have a video editing function (other than a basic one, more below) but since Ubuntu come with a pretty good one called Pitivi, Kazam will ask you to whether you wanna edit the video using Pitivity or just save it to disk.

You can directly open the recorded video in PiTiVi...
*. Kazam also has a YouTube video uploader (including a basic editor) which you can use to easily upload your content to YouTube and VideoBin services.


*. Saves the recorded multimedia file in .MKV container format.

You can install Kazam in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 10.10 and 10.04 by using the daily unstable PPA channel (the stable channels doesn't have packages for Ubuntu 11.04) + 11.10 is not yet added. Open your terminal window and enter the below commands.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:and471/kazam-daily-builds

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install kazam
So if you're searching for an easy to use, simple screen recorder for Ubuntu, then give a try to Kazam, it's pretty darn good!.

2 comments:

  1. AnonymousOctober 31, 2011 at 2:38 AM

    i always get this at the last line. pls help me




    Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
    requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
    distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
    or been moved out of Incoming.
    The following information may help to resolve the situation:

    The following packages have unmet dependencies:
    kazam : Depends: libx264-85 but it is not installable or
    libx264-98 but it is not installable or
    libx264-106 but it is not installable
    Depends: libmatroska0 but it is not installable or
    libmatroska2 but it is not installable or
    libmatroska3 but it is not installable
    Depends: libavdevice52 but it is not installable or
    libavdevice-extra-52 but it is not installable
    Depends: libavcodec-extra-52 but it is not installable
    E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

    ReplyDelete
  2. GayanOctober 31, 2011 at 8:56 AM

    @Anonymous,

    There could be several reasons. One is that we're using Kazam daily builds thus it may require the latest versions of those dependencies and they may simply not yet available in Ubuntu.

    OR you may have disabled the multiverse/universe repositories. In that case, if you use Ubuntu Software Center, then use it to enable them.

    OR if none of those are your issues, then try to install it using the "stable" daily builds PPA rather than this unstable one.

    In that case use the below commands instead of the ones in the post.

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:and471/kazam-daily-stable

    sudo apt-get update

    sudo apt-get install kazam

    ReplyDelete