The sort of add on for Firefox 'download helper' now has a new screen capture thing, in case it won't download the video from a particular site. You click the red button and a purple boundary appears round the video frame. I assume this is the basic function of the thing; it then provides the geometry of the purple frame to the program you've given it to capture the video.

By default the program it uses is 'recordmydesktop'. I've tried using this but get sound from the laptop's internal microphone, not the video. Tried 'pavucontrol' to remedy this but it says (wrongly) that no program is recording, so can't put things right.

So tried using ffmpeg: http://img845.imageshack.us/img845/7...loadhelper.jpg

Assume the stuff in curly brackets is what download helper supplies. Sometimes works perfectly but with B.BC. i-player only get the top left hand corner of the video and it is stretched somewhat horizontally.

Any thoughts at all apreciated.

Here is some info on screencasting. I've never tried that Firefox extension. What is that
extension named?

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...n-them-885959/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...torial-880858/
http://verb3k.wordpress.com/2010/01/...asts-on-linux/

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks, 'DownloadHelper'.

Tried the following ploy as a precursor to getting the dimensions of the image right.

Changed DownloadHelper's preferrences to: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images...screencap.jpg/

Where the shell script is:This stops the red button working for democracynow.org a thing it used to work perfectly before. But i-player works just as before, as you would expect, *except there is no sound*.

I do not have a computing degree like many of the people on the internet and this sort of thing completely mystifies me. There is no reason to it and you come up against this sort of thing again and again.

What I mean is democracynow.org should work the same as before, i.e. correctly, because apparently nothing has changed. Ditto i-player - which is now sans sound.

(For completeness it has to be stopped manually by terminating ffmpeg.)

Found some more threads on this.

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/inde...t-1392026.html

You may have to specify the alsa device to get the sound, I've seen this done several different ways.

http://www.commandlinefu.com/command.../sort-by-votes
http://verb3k.wordpress.com/2010/01/...asts-on-linux/

Let me know what you find out. A lot of interest in this I think.

Edit: html tags

1 members found this post helpful.

Bit embarassing. Just had made some elementary errors in ffmpeg flags, i.e. should be -i pulse not -f pulse and -s cif is what was telling it to get the wrong area to capture, it should be ommited.

Fixing that makes it work. But it has poorish image quality. Got some sort of bug with ffmpeg, or compiled it wrongly, so difficult to sort this out. But the principle of it works anyway.

For the record. Some people are as incompetant as me.

This configuration works quite well: file extension: ogv; executable: /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg; arguments: -f alsa -ac 2 -i pulse -f x11grab -b 2048k -s {width}x{height} -y -r 25 -i :0.0+{x},{y} {file}; stop capture: /usr/bin/killall; arguments: -3 /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg

It gives a fair image quality, i.e. fiddling about will give something usefull.

The point is it is very point and click friendly: You just connect to the video on firefox, hover the pointer over the red button, and click and the thing gets recorded. Otherwise you have to put the coordinates of the video's frame in manualy, which certainly defeats me.

EDIT: ffmpeg has to be compiled by yourself to include X11grab, etc. As in the link above.

What works for me is May need to fiddle about with 'pavucontrol' when ffmpeg is running to get the sound comming to/from the right thing, etc..