Recording VNC Sessions

Recording your own desktop is a great quick-and-easy way to create a screencast. There are two issues with this however:-

• You can only record what you have installed already, or whatever can be installed on your platform of choice. If you wish to demonstrate something which is in another version of Ubuntu, or an older version of a program it may be difficult to reconcile the necessary dependancies.
• Your screencast may have a different look than a viewer sees on their desktop, especially if you have installed extra software or have modified your desktop look and feel. This can be offputing for a new user when their desktop doesn't look the same as those they see in the screencasts they watch.

Setting up and recording a remote machine via VNC allows you to have an enclosed environment in which you control tightly the settings, and what applications are installed.

Alternatively recording a VNC session on the local machine - with no additional computers required - means you can have a second user/session in which you more tightly control settings. This allows you to have a user in which you can (for example) play around with application settings with no danger to your own application settings and data under your user account.

Recording a remote session of course requires the additional resource of another computer. This can be preferable to the method described in ScreenCasts/RecordingVirtualMachine because it means the workload is split over two hosts. The remote hosts runs the application being recorded (and a VNC server) and the local (recording) host only has to deal with the VNC client and the recording application.