Record Your Own Lectures
Inexpensive Way to Record Lectures
With a lot of help from others on the net, I've settled on using a combination of free software and relatively inexpensive hardware to record lectures including full screen capture. The screen capture includes small video of lecturer from webcam on the laptop. For freehand drawing, I used a Bamboo tablet, which is also captured on the screen. Audio is recorded using an xTag wireless mic.
Here is an example of a recording of a lecture.
Linux tools (as in "free") that were used include:
- ffmpeg for capturing the screen and audio, and for compressing afterwards,
- xawtv for displaying webcam view,
- xournal for freehand drawing, and
- other linux tools, like pkill, xtoolwait, wmctrl, and sleep.
The site http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=786095 is very useful for installing latest versions of x264 and ffmpeg. Also, the site System-Wide PulseAudio Equalizer Updated For Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, Added 2 Patches helped with setting volume gain on USB XTag mic.
Hardware includes:
- generic laptop running Ubuntu linux with webcam,
- xTag wireless microphone with USB connection, and
- Wacom intuos4 pen tablet, which should work via bluetooth but I ended up using USB connection.
Here are a set of three bash scripts I used.
- Run screencastSetup first,
- then to start recording run screencastRecord. Type 'q' to this process to stop recording.
- Afterwards, compress the video/audio file using screencastCompress.