README.org

camcorder.el

Tool for capturing screencasts directly from Emacs.

1. To use it, simply call M-x camcorder-record.
2. A new smaller frame will popup and recording starts.
3. When you’re finished, hit F12.

View screencasts are generated in ogv format, and you can even pause the recording with F11! You can also convert the .ogv file to a gif by issuing the command M-x camcorder-convert-to-gif.

If you want to record without a popup frame, use M-x camcorder-mode.

Dependencies

camcorder.el uses the Names and the cl-lib packages, so if you’re installing manually you need to install those too.

For the recording, camcorder.el uses the following linux utility:

• recordmydesktop.

For the conversion to gif, you will either one of the following two options:

• ffmpeg, or
• mplayer and imagemagick.

If you have these, it should work out of the box. If you use something else, you should still be able to get camcorder.el work by configuring camcorder-recording-command and camcorder-gif-conversion-commands.

Troubleshooting

If camcorder.el seems to pick an incorrect window id (differing from the one that wminfo returns), you can change camcorder-window-id-offset from its default value of 0.

If you the recording ends and the emacs window seems to have frozen try pressing C-g, this maybe caused by your shell if your using fish for example. You can use the below to make emacs use bash which should fix this issue.

(setq shell-file-name "/bin/bash")