HowTo: ScreenCasts & Desktop Records via Istanbul

Istanbul is a desktop session recorder for the Free Desktop. Istanbul records your desktop session into an Ogg Theora video file. The video file can then be used for your presentation, demos, tutorials and video works. Istanbul desktop session recorder offers a lot greate screen recording features. Istanbul can record audio sounds, running videos, 3D desktop screens, mouse movements, specific screen area, screen size and desktop application windows.

Istanbul Operations

Istanbul relies on new x display screen capturing support in gstreamer-plugins package. The ximagesrc gstreamer element is under active development upstream yet.

When launched, Istanbul sits down on top of your notification area as a small red button. Then istanbul waits for mouse clicks for further operations. To start desktop session recording, simply click on Istanbul red icon from the notification area and to stop you click its icon again. Use your mouse right click to view and change istanbul's desktop recording options and features. The resulting video file is in OGG video file format which makes it easy for playback. Istanbul works on GNOME, KDE, XFCE and others.

For a clear and smooth desktop session recording and screencasting, it is highly recommended that your screen resolution is set lower or equal to 800x640 screen reso. Istanbul works roughly with my 1024x768 screen reso. The frame rate should also be adjusted to 1.0 frame rate per second to immediately capture every possible screen movements and desktop operations. I am still trying to achieve this, python suggestion?

When recording, the small red button turns into a square gray box still sitting down from the notification area. Click the square gray box from the notification area to stop the desktop recording. From there, Istanbul would then ask you for the filename before saving the video file. Once the saving is done, you can now start viewing the OGG video file.

Istanbul Installation

Istanbul can be installed to Fedora 8 via yum

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# yum -y install istanbul
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Binary Launch:

Alt+F2, istanbul

Sample Recording
The below istanbul screencasting were recorded from my 17" monitor with 1024x768 screen reso. As you can see, the video is turtle-walk and roughly delayed with most screen and mouse movements. I may need to adjust my frame rates. I have tried a lower screen reso but bad screencasting I achieved. Istanbul had done a great start on linux screencasting but there's always a lot of improvement left. I would keep an eye on this.

Here's a recorded session using a terminal window:

And with desktop effects enabled, below is a sample not-so-good screencasting I have done so far:





For further related reading, you may visit Istanbul and Fedora-Wiki.

The above screencasts has been done on Fedora 8. If you like this post, I would be glad if you can share it support of sharing it or hitting some diggs and stumbles.

Would appreciate all your support! Thanks!