Capturing Your Deskop Using VLC

Last week I started coding some JavaScript to help with some interactive stuff that I'm working on. Today, I thought about making a demonstration video of what the small library can do but discovered that the FFMpeg that comes with Lucid Lynx has a problem dealing with OGV files. This is a problem for me because I use GTKRecordMyDesktop for capturing my screen then use FFMpeg to convert the resulting video into another format like AVI or MPEG.

Looking around the Web, I also discovered that the problem had something to do with an upgraded version of Theora, which GTKRecordMyDesktop encodes videos to. And that apart from the stock Lucid FFMpeg, YouTube's transcoder has a problem with the current Theora as well. I had to look for another way to do a screen capture.

Here's the solution that I will be using. It involves VLC.

Step One. Open VLC. From the menu, go to Media > Convert / Save.

Step Two. Go to the Capture Device tab and select Desktop from the Caputre Mode drop-down. Click "Convert / Save" at the bottom, this will bring up another small window.

Step Three. Under "Destination", type in a file name like "test.mpg". Do not check the "display the output" box, because doing so will not be good.

Step Four. Under "Settings", choose the "Video - MPEG-2 + MPGA (TS)" profile. It's one of the stock profiles that VLC comes with.

If you want to create your own profile, you might want to take a look at mine:
Encapsulation: MPEG-TS
Video codec: MPEG-2
Video Bitrate: 2048 kb/s
Framerate: 30.00 fps
Width: 864
Height: 480

Step Five. Press start when you're done tweaking the profile and VLC will start capturing your desktop. When you're done, simply hit the Stop button. After hitting Stop, it's important that you don't hit Play again, otherwise your previous video capture will be written over. Remember.

One drawback in using this method though is you can only do the video. You won't be able to capture audio at the same time, methinks. So you'll need to record your audio annotations separately, then join the audio and video streams using an editor. But such is life.