Professional screencasting has always been left to proprietary systems such as Windows and Mac since the only quality software created for screencasting has always been geared toward those users. That all changed once RecordItNow was released for the KDE platform.

RecordItNow was created to fill the gap between the poor performing free applications and commercial approaches (none of which are available in Linux). Tauted as a “plugin based [KDE] desktop recorder”, it is much more than a simple desktop recorder. It can be used on any Linux variant with the help of a few KDE libraries.

Installing RecordItNow is rather easy, though it does require a few extra ‘plugins’ to fully function. One required plugin is the well known RecordMyDekstop application. Since RecordItNow is completely plugin based, it can use other recording applications with ease though it currently only support RecordMyDesktop.

For full functionality you will also want to download and install Mencoder and Ffmpeg. These two plugins are required if you want to encode your screencasts into formats like.flv (flash),.avi or just about any other standard format. Best of all, once installed RecordItNow can handle all the encoding automatically.

Installing RecordItNow and it’s plugins can be done in three ways in Kubuntu. The first and easiest way for most people is the GUI package manager KPackageIt. There are also two command line ways, through apt-get and with the aptitude package manager.

Before you can install RecordItNow though, you have to add the PPA repository which contains it. To add the new repository from the command line, enter in this command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:darcio53/ppa

Or by using the GUI:

Click on the Menu to open it. Then select System Settings. Under Computer Administration click “Add and Remove Software”. From the left menu, click on Setting and then on “Edit Software Sources” from the right panel. You will be asked to enter the administrator password. Once the Software Sources window opens which on the “Other Software” tab. Then click on “Add” and add the repository:

ppa:darcio53/ppa

Once you have reloaded the repository list, its time to download and install RecordItNow.

Still in the Add and Remove Software window, click on Software Management in the left panel. Now in the search box type in “recorditnow”. Once it’s found click the gray arrow on the ride, and then click Apply to install it. Do the same for “mencoder” and “ffmpeg”.

To install via apt-get and aptitude is easy. Open a terminal window by pressing ALT-F2 on your keyboard then type “konsole”.

Once in the terminal, all you have to do is type in one of these two commands to install RecordItNow, mencoder and ffmpeg

sudo apt-get install recorditnow mencoder ffmpeg

or

sudo aptitude install recorditnow mencoder ffmpeg

That’s it! Once you have completed those steps you can open RecordItNow and begin recording professional quality screencasts in Linux.

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