Capturing screen video

I plan on making some video tutorials on Inkscape and the GIMP for this site. Thinking about the number of screenshots sent me to a tizzy. Then, an idea: why not just do videos instead? Capital!

Intermediate problem: how to capture the on-screen action. I needed some form of screencam software to do that.

Intermediate answer: XVidCap!

XVidCap isn't available in the Ubuntu repositories, but it's okay. You can download a .deb file from SourceForge.

Once you get that, installation is simple:

sudo dpkg -i xvidcap_1.1.5rc1_i386.deb

A menu item for XVidCap should now appear in the Sound and Video group of your Applications menu. You can also invoke it manually with

xvidcap

Launching XVidCap brings up a floating menu bar with buttons to select capture windows and to start and stop recording. Files are saved in MPEG, suitable for uploading to Google Video or YouTube.