Screen recorder - Kazam

[Sean McNamara]

Hi,

On Sat, Dec 31, 2011 at 2:23 PM, David Klasinc <bigwhale at lubica.net> wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> Recently I picked up Kazam Screencaster. I needed to record something
> and noticed that Kazam is not working and has some dependency issues in
> Oneiric. After trying out few other solutions none of them really suited
> me. Around Christmas I started working on Kazam and made some
> improvements while solving those dependency problems.
>
> Andrew Higginson stopped working on the project and made me a member of
> Kazam team on Launchpad so I can take over from here.

Cool! Congrats on volunteering to maintain this project! :) I'm not
familiar with Kazam, but I'm learning about it now, since it seems
interesting and useful...

>
> https://launchpad.net/kazam
>
> Right now most of the development is done in my PPA until I get things
> stable enough and merge them in the stable branch of the project.
>
> https://launchpad.net/~bigwhale/+archive/kazam-oneric
>
> (yes, the typo should be there :/)
>
> Quick rundown of changes that I made:
>
> - Default backend is now gstreamer.
> - Video is encoded with vp8 instead of x264.
> - Audio is encoded with Ogg Vorbis.
> - Audio/Video container is now WebM.

Very cool! While I completely agree that these codec choices should be
the default, is it easy for the user to configure Kazam to use some
other codec? I'm not saying VP8/WebM is bad; rather, I'm saying some
other codecs may have their uses (e.g. if you intend to distribute it
as a raw video and you want the highest platform compatibility, VP8 is
still not that heavily adopted on older Windows systems, or even older
Linux distros). And the quality will be much higher if it is encoded
directly to the format that you intend to distribute it in, rather
than performing lossy transcoding.

> - Package dependencies revised to include only essential packages.
> - Basic Pulseaudio support.
> - Independent audio input device selection
> - Volume setting slider in the works
> - The path to multiple source recording is now open. Next release should
> support recoding audio on two channels (application sounds and
> voice-over commentary, for example).
>
> Currently Kazam is still GTK2 and I'd like few pointers on what needs to
> be done if I want Kazam to be included in the Ubuntu repositories for
> Precise Pangolin. And if I missed the mailing list, someone please kick
> me in the right direction. :)

The best place to get started is to read
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ContributeToUbuntu -- and follow the links
from there.

You're already very far along because you've already:
-Written the software
-Created a source package for DPKG
-Put it in a PPA
-Communicated with the community announcing your package and soliciting feedback

This is a very large step in the right direction. The rest, as they
say, is testing/validation and politics. :)

Also I'm not 100% sure but you can probably get it accepted into
Precise (in Universe, dunno about Main) with a GTK2 UI. The GTK2 libs
will continue to stick around for years and years (and years) to come.
Although if you are able, and there are no really challenging
roadblocks, you should go ahead and try with GTK3.

My general porting strategy for GTK3:

1. Build against the gtk3 libs and headers in your build system (easy)
2. Fix any compilation errors (can require some rewriting, but not
that much usually)
3. Fix any linkage errors (can be painful if your favorite API is gone)
4. Test it out like crazy to make sure that everything works
equivalently at runtime (time-consuming but easy)

Are there any really low-level GTK2 APIs that Kazam uses that might've
been removed or significantly changed in GTK3? I guess I could read
the source, but I'm getting ready to head out the door right now,
so...

Anyway, Happy New Year to you as well, and thanks for working on this
and being interested in contributing!

Disclosure: I am not an Ubuntu Developer, though I do host a project
on Launchpad, package it in a PPA, and have expressed interest in
getting it into Universe in the past... so we are pretty much at the
same stage :)

Regards,

-Sean


>
>
> (more detailed explanation on my changes and future plans are posted on
> my blog: http://www.twm-kd.com/linux/kazam-screencaster-0-12/ )
>
> So much for now and a Happy 2021 to everyone!
>
> Regards,
> David
>
>
>
>
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