Solved Capturing desktop videos

[obsigna]

I cannot get multimedia/obs-studio to capture anything. Both Screen and Window Capture stop immediately, showing the following alert box:

I am using this on a GNOME 3 desktop.

Does OBS work in general out of the box or are some tweaks necessary. In any case, I would be grateful for any hints. I do not need sound capturing, so if an alternative exist, I would like to learn about this as well.

 

[shepper]

I use ffmpeg called with this script:

ffmpeg -video_size 1400x900 -framerate 30 -f x11grab -i :0.0 -c:v libx264 -qp 0 -preset ultrafast capture.mkv

You can preface it with a sleep(1) command and move the terminal out of the way and start what you want to record.

sleep 10 && ffmpeg -video_size 1400x900 -framerate 30 -f x11grab -i :0.0 -c:v libx264 -qp 0 -preset ultrafast capture.mkv

When finished, put the focus back in the terminal and Crtl-c to stop recording.

 

[obsigna]

That ffmpeg command works very well for me. Thank you very much!
Therefore, I won’t need OBS studio and I deleted it already.

 

[Maxnix]

It's incredible how much useful and versatile ffmpeg(1) can be.
Thank you!

 

[obsigna]

I worked a bit on screen casting with multimedia/ffmpeg on a GNMOE 3 + FreeBSD 12.1 desktop system. Although, I wrote, I don't need audio recording, I decided that I want this as well.

After all it was easy, but there were some obstacles:

• which is the mic device and how do I adjust the mic level for preventing high background noise?
  
  
• in which order do I need to place the screen grabbing and sound recording options on the ffmpeg command line, not to talk about the double placement of the mysterious -thread_queue_size option?
  
  
• which encoder(s) do I use for optimal web publishing?
  
  
• why does Safari, Chrome, Waterfox and QuickTime on macOS 10.14 refuse to play the scrreencast while VLC happily plays everything in Tecnicolor?

Well, I found out the answers to all of these doubts, and right before everything becomes forgotten again, I wrote it up into a BLog post.

The post is in German language, however, the translation with the Microsoft Translater is well readable.
German:

https://obsigna.com/articles/1577324342.html​

​

English (by the MS Translator):

https://www.translatetheweb.com/?from=de&to=en&a=https://obsigna.com/articles/1577324342.html​

 

[kpedersen]

I might be a bit late to the party but also note that VLC allows you to capture the screen (and overlay audio).

 

[obsigna]

I might be a bit late to the party but also note that VLC allows you to capture the screen (and overlay audio).

Mikhail Gorbachev said once: "Those who are late will be punished by life itself."

Anyway, for me ffmpeg is much more appealing for the purpose of screencasting than any GUI application, because it can be startet and stopped without me needing to fiddle in the scenes which I want to capture. I enter via ssh from my iPhone and submit the start command. Once I am ready, I submit <Ctrl><C>.

 

[Nicola Mingotti]

i used such methods to record in the past. nowadays i use Camtasia. Highly recommended if your interest in the video production becomes stable. (my main FreeBSD lives in a vm, i run commercial soft in macOS)

 

[kpedersen]

because it can be startet and stopped without me needing to fiddle in the scenes which I want to capture. I enter via ssh from my iPhone and submit the start command. Once I am ready, I submit <Ctrl><C>.

That is a cool idea. I usually have to faff about in a simple video editor (I use Windows XP Movie Maker in VirtualBox XD) to cut off the beginning and end part but ssh'ing avoids that

One thing in VLC is that if you need anything slightly weird (like overlaying sound from a file, etc) the GUI gives you the command line to execute so that you can run it in future from the cli via cvlc. This reminds me slightly of smitty on AIX and I quite like the concept (along with other innovations such as: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YMWSD69BWqI/hqdefault.jpg) XD.

But yes, ffmpeg has the big advantage that it doesn't drag in Qt and hundreds of other dependencies. If I didn't already have VLC installed for watching (totally not pirated) films; I would certainly use that.

 

[Alexander88207]

I use multimedia/simplescreenrecorder to record the desktop.

 

[DarkLord]

I know this is an older thread, but I was having this problem a while back too which is how I came here. For anyone else interested, it looks like this was a bug which was recently fixed in 25.0.1_1, bugzilla report here.