Video capture on Linux

I hope that this could be of use to anybody out there. This is something I was looking for in Linux for recording games on video, pretty much like what Tremulous already does with the /record /stoprecord for demos or /video /stopvideo for AVI video. The thing is that Tremulous eats your processor when you try to record in high resolutions, and the resulting videos don't have good quality for posting on YouTube, unless you own a Quad Core or at least a Core2Duo machine.

If you are a Windows user there is one very good program called Fraps (http://www.fraps.com ) and they have a free version for recording small clips with their watermark pasted in it.

EDIT: I found another recording software for Windows and it's free under the GPL: http://camstudio.org/ drop me a line here if you try it.

For Linux there are many recording programs like recordMyDesktop (http://recordmydesktop.sourceforge.net ) for some basic stuff or the hard core Yukon (https://devel.neopsis.com/projects/yukon/ ) for live streaming games or recording video from games, but the one I'm using now is called GLC (http://nullkey.ath.cx/projects/glc ) for OpenGL games in Unix or Linux.

If you don't mind getting your hands dirty in the console for installing or typing some commands, here are the install instructions: http://nullkey.ath.cx/projects/glc/wiki/HowtoInstall

What can you get from it? I have tested doing high definition recording of some games (so far only 720p) with high quality audio at 60fps without performance loss on some games like FlightGear, on Ubuntu Jaunty 64bits on a Core2Duo. If you want to show off your latest kills or acrobatics in high definition this is the software you need.

Here are 2 videos I did with it, one from Tremulous and the other from FlightGear (http://www.flightgear.org ). For fast uploading I recorded FlightGear at 60 frames per second no audio at 640 x 512, and Tremulous at 30 fps 1024x768 with audio, both files resulting in MP4 format (PSP or Ipod Compatible) at about 180MB file size each.





Happy video game recording!