I recently tried out recordMyDesktop (not the GTK+ frontend, just the CLI program, I wanted to Keep It Simple this time ), and found that the videos it records/encodes show massive motion-smearing artifacts when played back. This is without the "--on-the-fly-encoding" option; with it, the video looks fine (i.e. has no artifacts other than the typical ones found in any compressed video), but it plays back too quickly (the time-step between frames is too high, thus making everything go too fast when the video is played back, even though the frame rate is low). Here's a screenshot of the video playing, showing what the artifacts look like (they're nasty!).

I've searched Google and LQ about this problem to no avail: either there were no relevant results, or it was just a post on a different forum asking basically the same question, but with no answer. So apparently this problem is either really rare, or it's something specific to my configuration, and mine alone (highly unlikely).

System specs:

• CPU: Intel® Core® i5 430M @ 2.27 GHz
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce® 310M w/ 512 MiB VRAM
• RAM: 4 GiB

Command used to record:

I've tried different options, such as --quick-subsampling, as well as tweaking the video quality and bitrate settings (--v_quality and --v_bitrate), all of which did nothing to change/get rid of the artifacts. Is there something I'm missing here?

have a look and see if there are any extra codes your play needs to play .ogv files
kaffiene plays them ok.
otherwise turn them into something else with ffmpeg I m trying to get lives video editor to work with files recorded with recordmydesktop Im using the gtk front end

I'm using GNOME MPlayer to play these, and it handles other Theora videos just fine. It doesn't make any difference what output method I'm using to play it (vdpau, x11, gl/gl2, etc.).

I've tried this...it doesn't remove the artifacts, no matter what format I try encoding it into (I've tried uncompressed AVI, H.264 [.mp4], and standard MPEG [.mpg]). I have a feeling it's in the way recordMyDesktop does the initial encoding (i.e. all ffmpeg is doing is re-encoding the whole thing, artifacts and all).

I know this thread has gotten kind of old, but I just wanted to let people know that I found a much better solution for screen recording.

This page has a great overview of how to record your screen and convert it to something web-friendly (for posting on YouTube,*sending over e-mail, etc) using FFmpeg.

For those who don't want to read the whole thing, here's the basic format for recording a screen capture to a lossless video file:

Just hit "q" when you want to stop recording.

From there you can re-encode it into whatever format you want (such as H.264 or Ogg Theora).

On Ubuntu I changed under System->Preferences->Monitors, Nvidia Xserver display configuration from 1366x768 to lower 1360x768 and massive graphic video capture artefact gone, disapear (99.9%)! Lowering screen resolution solved my problem on laptop with gtk-recordMyesktop.

I worked on Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick UTC 2011 i686 GNU/Linux with GTK-RecordMyDesktop ver. 0.3.8-1 installed from Synaptic, with activated Compiz and Docky, on Acer Aspire 6920 laptop, with 2.6.35-25-generic #44-Ubuntu. gtk-recordMyDesktop was set, in Advance tab to 100% quality and sound on, 15 FPS, and nothing else, for encoding after recording, with options in sound: Chanels 1, Freq 48000, in Device: "pulse"

also, in few simple steps, for enhanced audio, I extracted audio from ogv video envelope using:
and improoved sound with nice Audacity:
under Effect option, after Noise Removal, Amplify, Normalize... I exported sound in ogg format.

If you don't before, install oggz-merge from Synaptic, and import sound back in video with:
After such few steps, you can educate, share and enjoy in your good video and audio capture in output.ogv.

Thank you ZlatPap for providing the solution! Your solution worked for me too. I too have a Nvidia GPU and a screen resolution of 1366x768. I lowered the resolution to 1360x768 and the massive nasty artifacts as described by MrCode are gone! When I change the resolution back to 1366x768, the screen artifacts are back again.

What's even more weird, is that lowering the screen resolution solved *another* annoying Compiz issue I was having (unrelated to recordmydesktop). I was meaning to record that issue with recordmydesktop and make a bug report, but found that the issue was no longer present after lowering the screen resolution! What was my other issue you ask? With desktop wall enabled and at least 3 desktops horizontally, a window on desktop 2 (horizontally) or higher jumps to the first desktop when switching to the desktop on the right of that window.

@MrCode: If ZlatPap's solution also worked for you, please mark this thread as solved.