Terminal: Byzanz

If a picture’s worth a thousand words, are moving pictures worth exponentially more? A philosophical Shashank Sharma wonders through the frame of a terminal…

To extend the functionality of Byzanz without involving a graphical interface, go to http://bit.ly/byzanz-scripts and download the zip archive. The scripts inside ( byzanz-region.sh and byzanz-window.sh) are based on ones provided by Rob W to the Ubuntu forums.

The byzanz-region.sh scripts requires the xrectsel tool, which is used to identify the dimensions of the rectangular region you wish to record. This tool isn’t available in the software repositories of any distribution and must be installed from its Git repository. Before you install xrectsel, make sure you have all its dependencies installed –

autogen , autoconf , libx11 and libx11-dev . Thankfully, these are offering the software repositories for most popular distributions. Now, you can install xrectsel by running the following commands: $ git clone https://github.com/lolilolicon/xrectsel.git $ cd xrectsel/ $ ./bootstrap $ ./configure $ sudo make install

With xrectsel installed, you can run the byzanz-region.sh script with ./byzanz-region.sh . By default, the script stores the output as a gif file in the ~/Pictures directory.

You can tweak these settings by modifying the script to you liking. For instance, if you wish to record a flv screencast, with audio, edit the byzanz-record --cursor --verbose --delay=0 --duration=$D ${ARGUMENTS} “$FOLDER/GIFrecord_$TIME.gif” line in the script

and add the -a command switch.