Screencasts with xvidcap in Ubuntu 10.04

In the near future I'm going to need to do a couple of screencasts, so I've tried different programs to do it: recordmydesktop, recorditnow, istanbul and xvidcap. The one that gets the best video (for example a moving score in Musescore) is xvidcap, but I couldn't get it to get the sound, no matter what (and it seems that this is a common problem in Ubuntu 10.04).

It turns out that the package that you download via Synaptic is broken in this respect, so the solution is to uninstall that one, and instead install xvidcap_1.1.7jaunty_i386.deb (at http://sourceforge.net/projects/xvidcap/files/) In order to install it in my x86_64 system I just have to use the --force-architecture option to the dpkg -i command.

angelv@vaso:~/Desktop$ sudo dpkg --force-architecture -i xvidcap_1.1.7jaunty_i386.deb 

But when trying to run it I see that there are some i386 libraries missing. In order to easily install them I use the getlibs script.

angelv@vaso:~/Desktop$ padsp xvidcap
xvidcap: error while loading shared libraries: libtheora.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

angelv@vaso:~/Desktop$ getlibs /usr/bin/xvidcap

Once that is in place, it is quite easy to record a screencast, together with the audio produced by the computer:

1. Start xvidcap with padsp 
2. Once you start recording with xvidcap, make sure that the Recording is done from the "Monitor of Internal Audio Analog Stereo", which can be modified with pavucontrol.
3. When recording from Musescore (and probably other programs as well), make sure that the sound is being sent to PulseAudio.

The following video illustrates these options and the end result:  http://vimeo.com/20552593