Wow haven’t we come far!
I am proud to announce that the new 0.11 release of Kazam is now open to the public. In this release, I focused on stability and bug fixes (we had 28 of them!) so that people can now try out Kazam without any worries or hassles (after the many issues people faced with the first release). Therefore if issues put you off trying Kazam in the first place, please do try it now!
However that is not to say that we haven’t had any new features!
In this new release of Kazam, we have:
- A logo created by Robert McKenna!
- Ability to select screen to record from
- About dialogs
- Pausing in screencasts
- Ability to select video and audio quality
- Easier selection of upload URL
- Ability to go backwards from export window
- Warning when overwriting
With this new release of Kazam, I have slightly changed the structure of development so it is better for the end-user (you guys!). We now have both a stable and unstable branch and PPA.
The unstable series contains the latest and greatest features in Kazam, however as a result it will be a bit unstable. If you want the very bleeding edge features and don’t mind doing a bit of bug reporting, this series is for you
The stable series contains the bug fixes that filter down from the unstable branch, as well as new features every periodic release. However to keep the stuff in here as stable, you will not get new features immediately. If you just want stability and are not too fussed about the latest and greatest, this series is for you
To try out Kazam, either use our stable or unstable PPA:
- Stable – https://edge.launchpad.net/~and471/+archive/kazam-daily-stable
- Unstable – https://edge.launchpad.net/~and471/+archive/kazam-daily-builds
And again, we are always looking for new contributors
Great work Andrew! Thanks!
You’re welcome
Big thx for this app
Some people on omgubuntu were questioning your use of ffmpeg instead of GStreamer.
Would you consider making a blog post justifying the choice, or comment on the omgubuntu post?
I’d post the URL, but WordPress would probably assume it’s spam.
Definitely, thanks for bringing this to my attention
I noticed you commented on the omgubuntu post, thanks for that.
Kazam popped up on OMG Ubuntu again …
I played with gstreamer and kazam some time ago, the result is here:
https://code.launchpad.net/~bigwhale/kazam/gstreamer
Unfortunately gstreamer has three serious issues that prevent its use:
- h.264 support is moderate and you can’t record near ‘lossless’ videos that is required for screen capturing.
- ximagesrc plugin has trouble capturing when only one of the two screens is used (filed a bug report for this)
- ximagesrc plugin is a CPU hog and capturing screen together with sound results in a disaster, gstreamer devs told me that this is how it is and I could go and rewrite that plugin
So if anyone knows how to capture picture and sound with gstreamer with no dropped frames and corrupted data streams, all tips are welcome.
I took the liberty of updating the use GStreamer bug report in Kazam.
Good work though David! Shame it didn’t work.
I did few minor updates in my gstreamer branch. It needs testing.
Hi Andrew! Thanks for this promising tool
I’m trying to do some teaching using free software only. I have recorded some videos already using Kazam, but I have a problem. I have no idea how to crop the videos! It looks like Openshot nor Pitivi do cropping. Avidemux has some problems with the MKV file saved by Kazam. Any suggestions? Maybe a command line tool? Thanks!
Hey Abe!
Cropping is definitely a feature that I want to have in the future in Kazam, however for the moment I have been using kdenlive to crop the screencasts (with the Crop filter).
Hope that helps, and thanks for the compliments
Thanks for the tip. Works great! I didn’t know Kdenlive. There is also Cinelerra out there. Sometimes I wonder if Pitivi, Openshot, Cinelerra and Kdenlive couldn’t share efforts. Much of their work is overlapping I guess.
Here a tip. I found it useful to resize windows before recording using a script:
http://314bits.com/blog/2010/10/script-to-move-and-resize-a-window-in-linux/
Pingback: Script to move and resize a window in Linux | 314bits
I just thought of something that would make Kazam totally rock
Now it’s possible to pause and resume. Being able to rewind a bit would be amazing to avoid post editing: I’m explaining something and I make a mistake. So I pause, I rewind a bit, maybe seeing and hearing the recording, then continue recording overwriting my mistake. I think it’s much easier to remove mistakes while you present, because you remember the context and know exactly what you are talking about, than later having to edit the full clip removing mistakes.
I don’t know if it fits the ‘super simple screencast tool’ concept though…
Hi Andrew,
we just checked out Kazam, and it seems to finally solve the quality issues with screenrecording on linux. It also worked well with a multithreaded photo app in the foreground and 1080p. Thumbs up, that’s really cool and a very useful program.
Please don’t get depressed by a lack of collaboration, that’s open source world. Hope to see some progress on it. A small thing I was missing, when saving the output for later use, it would be nice to pass a commandline (to e.g. choose a different encoder) or some options to x264.
greets mike
Thanks for the kind words mike
You’re welcome.
I really hope you proceed with the good work.
Two more suggestions, first a possibility to set the nice value of the ffmpeg thread and second a possibility to just record a specific window or part (although that may be your “cropping” plan, doing it while recording may save power on smaller systems)
greets mike
Thank you so much. I just found Kazam today and I am very happy with it. Please keep up the good work!
Pingback: OMG Video Review: Kazam Screen Recorder Tool
What’s next for Kazam then?
Really nice tool!!! the best one for me. Please keep going working on this
Have to say this is a great app. Kudos on the development. I especially appreciate the fact that the ‘twiddle the knobs’ are truly post production.
But I do have a question. Kazam uses .MKV container which is great. But could someone expound on what the default internals are set to in the container? eg
video format? — dvd, au, flac is used?
video codec? — h261, flv, mpeg4 is used?
bit rate is used?
etc.
The reason I ask is that I use Kazam to capture screen casts. I then use OpenShot Video Editor to perform edits, outtakes, etc. Several slides and multiple screen caps make up a video lesson I use in teaching. At times though I would like to save a modified .MKV screencaps back in its original format before I make a video of the lesson.
Anyone lead me in the right direction here? Thanks!!
Hi JohnMc,
So the video codec used is h264 (in lossless mode) so the bit rate doesn’t really come into it, the audio codec used is flac with an audio bitrate of 128k.
Glade you like the app!
Andrew,
Thank you for the reply. Just tried a short capture between Kazam and OpenShot and it worked like a charm.
Will it be to hard to add a feature that only records a region of your screen?
I really need that, and I might be able to add it, with some guidance of course.
Thanks Andrew
I shouldn’t think so, in the mockups of Kazam in my original post, you can see how I would implement this in the GUI (after recording, in the export window). I guess you would just have to add some options to the ffmpeg command Kazam runs in exporting, and implement this in the GUI.
HI Andrew, thank you
I’ve been looking at your code and extracted the command you are using to record, modified that a bit to get a fixed region and it totally works
now, the thing is, recording uses a LOT of CPU, is this normal for this method?, using recordMydesktop uses far less CPU, I’m trying to get the best performance cause I’m recording 3D apps that require a lot of that CPU to work.
I’m looking at the gst-launcher option, seems like it uses less CPU but I’m not getting anything out of it
by the way, I’m using the commands on your VIDEO_STUFF file in the source code
Thanks again
I must say I am not entirely sure about the CPU thing, but I am glad it all went well for you
It appears I am still subscribed to this thread.
Anyway, performance-wise it would be better to capture just a region of screen. This can be done in ffmpeg and gstreamer. This approach would also make post-recording conversion more time efficient, because of the smaller video.
Unfortunately i had to clean install Natty Narwhal.
Is there a build for It on the works?
Please, let me know.
Thanks.
No not at the moment, however you can use the Maverick build in the PPA and it should work.
It can work quite well, the decrease of speed is not really obvious. As this is still new, a few features are missing. Can you add these two features:
1. Window capture
Capture a window of a program.
2. Area capture
Capture a specified area, the area is indicated by a dotted line box. You can also have an option for the window to follow the mouse.
Hopefully, these features won’t decrease the speed by a lot.
Thanks a lot for this great software, the countdown helped a lot.
Also, the countdown can do with an adjustable feature to adjust the countdown.
Thanks
Fantastic application.. I’m sure someone has asked this and I apologize if I’m beating a dead horse. Will there be support for selecting a single window (web browser window vs entire screen) in future releases? Thank you so much for your hard work.
Out of curiosity, are you still planning to work on Kazam in the future? Oneiric build? I’d love to talk about few things, so if you can get back to me on email or irc.freenode?
Could you release an oneiric ppa?
hi,
i like to try this software but unable to install in ubuntu 11.10, i got the following error, please guide me how to install.
kazam: Depends: python-central (>= 0.6.11) but 0.6.17 is to be installed
Depends: libx264-106 but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmatroska3 but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libavdevice-extra-52 but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libavcodec-extra-52 but it is not going to be installed
I really liked using Kazam, but after I upgraded Ubuntu it stopped working. I haven’t seen many updates to Kazam lately so I thought I could share here something that also works very well for recording screencasts: http://www.davidrevoy.com/index.php?article65/recordscreen-py-video-and-audio-capture-for-linux-with-ffmpeg I’ve used it for recording 80 episodes already. You can use that script until Kazam is updated.
Hi Andrew. Are you still working on Kazam? I see 11.10 daily builds in your PPA, but unfortunately I could install the build because of dep problems.
Have you given up on it?
For the time being yes :/
I’ve started an effort to bring this app back from the dead!
A good program, used to exit ubuntu 11.10. It is unfortunate that you do not have time to continue its support to date.
I thought about it a little and I think I could pick it up. Repackage everything and rewrite things that need rewriting. I know that I could just fork eveything, but I really don’t want to do that because I’d like to stick with current infrastructure.
If you can give me necessary permissions in launchpad for Kazam I’ll happily patch things up and work on existing bugs and features.
Hi, im from turkey and i use ubuntu 11.10.
im trying install kazam i have error;
~ > sudo apt-get install kazam
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
kazam : Depends: libavdevice52 but it is not installable or
libavdevice-extra-52 but it is not installable
Depends: libavcodec-extra-52 but it is not installable
Recommends: python-gdata but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
We def. need good FLOSS screencapture software! I have been wanting something for usability testing for a while now.
Just a thought: you could offer an open-source version and sell plugins for stuff like GPU encoding and support for proprietary codecs. It’s a legit way to make money as an off-the-shelf GPU library and patent protection actually cost money.
Thanks, hope to see revitalized development soon. Don’t give up, it takes a while to get community contributions.
does not work for me, it shuts itself off after a while. without being able to save my work, I’m on mint 11 katya 32 bit.