When Screencasting Goes Terribly Wrong
February 20th, 2008 by heathenxLast night felt like the worst night of my entire life. Let me fill you in. Richard and I signed on to record several screencasts on the subject of screencasting in Linux for ShowMeDo. I had already produced my first one without a hitch. My second second screencast was going to cover h264enc and mencoder. What I intended to do was record this second screencast in the same manner as the first one. I was going to record it in a VM on my openSUSE machine and I was going to use Ubuntu as my VM. I won’t go into details of why I chose to do this so it’s not worth talking about.
Anyway, things were going swimmingly last night with my very first take. However, trouble set in when I was almost done with my screencast. Nearly 3 quarters of the way in my VM power exited. Aborted! WTF! I thought. So I started my VM back up again thinking it was just a silly glitch. My VM for this OS was set at 1024×768 but upon rebooting the VM display switched to 800×600. Wonder what caused that. Well, I tried to adjust my resolution back to 1024×768 and then rebooted. This time I came in at 640×480. Do you see a pattern here? VirtualBox was giving me the finger for some reason. Odd since we were the best of friends.
So I decided to dig in and get to the bottom of things while keeping in mind that all I wanted to do was finish the damn screencast. I spent nearly an hour and a half trying to get my x.org rectified to no avail. Cripes! I could have deleted the VM and re-installed Ubuntu again in the time that it took me dinking around with things. And I didn’t even fix it. So it’s still broken.
Being defeated by VirtualBox I gathered what was left of my pride and decided to screencast this bad boy in openSUSE instead. It was the only option that I had. So I set up a new user so that my highly customized openSUSE desktop looked a little more default and standard looking. Maybe I should have justed used Suse in the first place.
Once I got everything ready I started recording again. This time I got all the way through with my tutorial. I was using recordmydesktop in the terminal. When I stepped back in to my terminal to stop recording and start encoding, recordmydesktop locked up…meaning I just lost my entire screencast. There is nothing more frustrating than that. It has happened to me several times in the past.
Cool heads prevail so I started up recordmydesktop in the terminal and recorded again. This time the same thing happened. Mother fu…! I tried it again. Same thing. Right about then I felt like Bruce Banner right before he turned into the Hulk. I was about ready to go “mailboxing” with my lucky Louisville Slugger, if you know what I mean. What’s frustrating is completing the entire screencast only to be disappointed in the end when the damn thing locks up.
Ok, this time, I rebooted my machine. Perhaps I “glitched” something. This time I got myself set up again and started recording. Again, I got all the way to the end of my screencast when I tried to stop recordmydesktop and it hung dead in my terminal. Alright, time to switch over to qt-recordmydesktop. I wanted to see what would happen with that, knowing full well that it was still using the same dieing package as the one that I was running in the terminal. This time I ran a few tests. It seemed to be recording just fine. So I started in again. Got all the way to the end of my screencast and qt-rcordmydesktop locked up. That’s when I exploded. Blood every where. Wife and kids not happy. 
By this time I had already spent 4 hours trying to record this 15 minute screencast. 4 hours! I bet you can imagine how pissed I was to spend all of that time on something and then not see any results. Let me tell ya…no amount of Hail Mary’s or Our Father’s got me anywhere last night. Speaking of God, I felt like I was Job or something…and experiment. Somebody was playing with me. All of this was going through my head. I think at one point I was going to leave screencasting completely. Quit my job and start selling Amway. You know, a new direction in life.
Anyway, recordmydesktop hadn’t beaten me yet. Recording seemed to work in short bursts. So I decided to split up my recording. I would record a couple of minutes and stop it. That seemed to work. Although that even crashed a few times too.
I thought maybe there might have been an update So I opened my browser and headed out to the recordmydesktop website. Sure enough there was an update to all three packages: recordmydesktop, gtk-recordmydesktop, and qt-recordmydesktop. I checked my version on openSUSE and noticed that I was 3 point releases behind. So I looked for a new rpm file. None. That meant that I was going to compile it. I download all 3 source files, compiled them, and installed them. Now I had the latest and greatest.
By now it was really late in the evening. All that I had to do was re-record the ending of my screencast. So I tried to pickup where I left off and it worked. So now I am not sure if my new packages are working or maybe I just got lucky on the last part of my tutorial.
What I have now is 5 individual ogv (the newer recordmydesktops do not encode into the ogg container anymore) files. Today I will try to assemble those into one fluid video. Although, it may look a little odd. I may have little choice in the matter though. I suppose I could record it in a VM on my Windows machine but I really do not feel like recording it again. This screencast will be easy to re-record but I have already done it one billion times and now all I want to see is it going away.
February 20th, 2008 at 7:06 am
Seeing as how you’re recording a screencast about screencasting, obviously it’s a recursive error…
Har har. I’m here all week… try the veal.
If you were three point releases back on rmd and were already recording ogv files, then I must be *wayyy* behind in versions since I’m still spitting out ogg files. Your post does not make me want to upgrade.
Now go find your happy place before you hurt someone!
February 20th, 2008 at 7:17 am
The package in the Ubuntu repos is pretty old, however, I don’t think it’s necessary to upgrade. Especially if it works flawlessly for you. As far as I can tell there aren’t any new features exposed to the user anyway. I’m sure it’s all under the hood stuff. The new container isn’t really a big change. Everything plays and converts like like it did in the past.
I’m dragging ass today. Tired. Once I get two pots of coffee down me then maybe I’ll perk up. Staying away from donuts. They’ll likely slow me down further.
February 21st, 2008 at 12:27 pm
I hate it when nothing seems to go your way.. Looking forward to these videos, Will you be posting the videos here too?
February 21st, 2008 at 12:50 pm
@swmiller6
No, we’re not going to post them on our website. They are not Inkscape screencasts so they do not fit in well. That’s ok though. You can view them at ShowMeDo. Only my first screencast has been published so far. My second one is still pending review. Richard will be adding a couple to the series as well.
February 21st, 2008 at 12:56 pm
@heathenx
That makes sense… BTW your screencasts for inkscape are great!!!!
February 21st, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Thank-you
February 21st, 2008 at 1:21 pm
I can feel what you have gone through. Do you see now why rendering separate frames instead of a movie does make sense? This does not apply to recordmydesktop though but to rendering with for example Blender.
“I was going to record it in a VM on my openSUSE machine and I was going to use Ubuntu as my VM. I won’t go into details of why I chose to do this so it’s not worth talking about.” Interesting setup and yet not worth talking about?
Is openSUSE lagging behind or do you have an old distribution?
Anyway, keep the good work up.
February 21st, 2008 at 2:19 pm
@Serge
No. openSUSE is not lagging behind. I use version 10.3 and it is more cutting-edge than Ubuntu regarding the applications that I use. Read that last sentence carefully because I am not ripping on Ubuntu in any way. It alway seems like Ubuntu is very conservative about their repo packages. I know that they do this for stability and I’m not complaining about that. That makes sense. However, my openSUSE packages are usually newer than the ones on Ubuntu. That’s what I like about openSUSE (that and because I have been using that distro for years). Besides I’m a KDE guy at heart and openSUSE puts a lot of love into KDE.
The reason that I wanted to screencast in VM Ubuntu was that I thought it might be a little more familiar to some people. Also, I have a widescreen display and I didn’t want to record in a widescreen resolution since showmedo uses a 4:3 resolution. I don’t screencast my entire desktop, ever, so I wanted to use a “default” looking desktop if I had to do so. openSUSE is pretty popular but when people see that Ubuntu desktop in all of it’s brown glory then most folks know what they are looking at.
February 21st, 2008 at 3:41 pm
I found that interesting. I have never before thought about using a VM to have a standard desktop at hand. I should keep that in mind.
It’s funny. I thought that Ubuntu was intended to provide cutting-edge technology with Debian stability in mind. I would have expected openSUSE to be more conservative. I do not use either one of them, so this is all based on perception,
But this reminds me of one thing. If I am not mistaken, you downloaded recently KDE 4. What are your experiences with it?
February 21st, 2008 at 5:03 pm
@Serge
Don’t get me wrong. Ubuntu does have cutting-edge technology. That is a fact. What it lacks is some of the latest and greatest software in the repos. Some open source software moves pretty quickly. Take recordmydesktop, for instance. How many versions behind is the one in the repos? openSUSE didn’t have the latest and greatest either but it was a few point releases ahead of Ubuntu’s. I’ll take stable apps over beta apps any day but sometimes I need features that older software doesn’t have. The repos get updated eventually, it just takes then a little longer sometimes.
KDE4 is alright. I’m not quite ready for it yet. I will be when openSUSE officially releases it for openSUSE 11.0 later in the year. 4.0.1 is definitely better than 4.0.0. openSUSE has a live cd that you can test. I have it installed in my VM. It runs pretty well but it’s awfully bare at the moment.
February 22nd, 2008 at 6:27 am
Hi heathenx - your post makes for interesting reading. I’ve yet to properly try screencasting on Ubuntu (using recordmydesktop) - a quick test showed that it worked and that’s as far as I got. Everything I do is recorded on Windows (with HyperCam or CamStudio).
I’m also curious to know how well things work when using a VM, I’d always assumed that the VM would eat up too much cpu (or that the virtual graphics would update too slowly) so that screencasting wouldn’t work? Obviously not!
I’ll ask you about this in the Group (http://groups.google.co.uk/group/showmedo), I think some other authors would be curious to know about this too.
btw - your second video is up and it looks very nice, I’ve bookmarked it for future reference.
Ian.