HowTo: Record Desktop Session via Byzanz

Byzanz is a new born desktop session recorder for linux. Byzanz records current display sessions and saves them as GIF image files.

Byzanz desktop recorder offers several new features at its early binary age. Byzanz desktop recorder provides support for screen recording with or without cursor movements. Byzanz can also be customized to record desktop session on specific screen size or screen location. This byzanz feature allows a smaller and customized screen size and screen location desktop session recording.

Recorded desktop session file are being saved in GIF file format. GIF files are known to offer and contain framed image animations. Another feature of Byzanz is its capability to generate a looping GIF animation bringing you a non-stop image animation from a single GIF file. The file size of the resulting output GIF file from Byzanz varies widely on session recording time. A 10-second 1280x1024 recorded desktop session can reached a GIF file size of more than 150Kbytes. The resulting GIF file needs no further editing or modification and is ready for image viewing.

Though at its early stage, Byzanz can be a promising desktop session recorder for a frame-by-frame desktop session recorder.

Good job for byzanz though it needs further feature enhancements. One wishful feature can be an GUI-based integrated desktop environment for useful desktop friendliness. More to come and expect from Byzanz developers, so watch out for it soon!

Byzanz Installation

Byzanz though at its early age is available from Fedora Application/Multimedia Project and can be installed using yum.

To install byzan desktop recorder via yum, simply

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# yum -y install byzanz
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Binary Launch:

Alt+F2, byzanz-record

Sample Usage:
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# byzanz-record -c -l output.gif
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My Sample Desktop GIF Session:



Don't see the image animation? Right click on it and open in new browser window or download the file and open it up from your browser.

HTH