[SOLVED] recordmydesktop outputs trash files

SlackerDwight · 12-18-2014, 09:04 PM

Hey guys. I'm using recordmydesktop, latest on Slackware 14.1 current

First off I'd like to whine how that program's output isn't ever especially informative (at least not to me) but nevertheless it doesn't say anything alarming straight off.

However I'm getting video files much smaller than what I'd expect from recording 1/2 my screen area, and as I feared the resulting file plays choppily and super-skippily. I used vlc to play this, as well as the output files from the same program, different machine; and also these files on a windows machine. The result was the files created on my slackware box were defective, generally showing only a half dozen actual frames, per 30 seconds of video (but reporting what seemed like the right length in actual h:mm:ss) but I can't tell much more beyond that. Question is what to do?

Probably extraneous: I can say that when some of these files were created I'd been using that nouveau driver, while some more recent ones I did with the proprietary drivers from nvidia. I'd gotten the program off slackbuilds and it matches the latest version number on sourceforge.

jamison20000e · 12-19-2014, 02:59 PM

Got enough system resources

Quote:

at least not to me

can you post it?

For a quick fix could try Istanbul or VLC...

kikinovak · 12-19-2014, 04:09 PM

Recordmydesktop is a nifty piece of software, but you have to experiment quite a bit with all the options to get something usable. Here's a little HOWTO I wrote on the subject.

http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/L...ktop-HOWTO.txt

Cheers,

Niki

SlackerDwight · 12-19-2014, 08:39 PM

surely, jamison20000e

Code:

$ recordmydesktop --compress-cache --width 1000 --no-sound --v_quality 40 -o ~/randtest
Initial recording window is set to:
X:0   Y:0    Width:1000    Height:1080
Adjusted recording window is set to:
X:0   Y:4    Width:1008    Height:1072
Your window manager appears to be KWin


Detected compositing window manager.
Reverting to full screen capture at every frame.
To disable this check run with --no-wm-check
(though that is not advised, since it will probably produce faulty results).

Initializing...
Capturing!
^C
*********************************************

Cached 1 MB, from 412 MB that were received.
Average cache compression ratio: 99.6 %

*********************************************
Saved 100 frames in a total of 101 requests
Shutting down......
STATE:ENCODING
Encoding started!
This may take several minutes.
Pressing Ctrl-C will cancel the procedure (resuming will not be possible, but
any portion of the video, which is already encoded won't be deleted).
Please wait...
Output file: /home/kal/randtest.ogv
[100%] 
Encoding finished!
Wait a moment please...
   
Done.
Written 297257 bytes
(297257 of which were video data and 0 audio data)

Cleanning up cache...
Done!!!
Goodbye!

Uhm, now that I see it all spread out I come to understand that the "Reverting to full screen capture at every frame" might be of significance. My own researches showed that that's the fallback option you don't want. Unfortuantely, I no longer have the machine that recorded the known working videos, so I can't compare whether they also detected window managers

SlackerDwight · 12-20-2014, 01:48 PM

Thank youuuu, kikinovak. It wound up being the --v_bitrate 2000000 ; which is odd since I do recall testing it on a very small screen area, but I guess the default bitrate had been set too low when the program had been made, for the newest theora incarnation to handle properly(??). when I tried setting to 2000000 as your guide suggests it worked on both xfce and kde now (without and with compositing wm, respectively)

green_vein · 12-21-2014, 06:57 AM

There's also ssr. I haven't tried it yet, but have just a few moments ago installed it.

http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.1/desktop/ssr/