VNCREC

Home page: http://www.sodan.org/~penny/vncrec/

VNCREC has been around for some time, and hasn't really been developed further since its original creation. The key with vncrec is that it can record a vnc session. What this means is that it's possble to record a full desktop running on a remote computer or indeed the local one.

twibright version

There is a fork of the original vncrec (from 2002) on http://ronja.twibright.com/utils/vncrec/ (latest Changelog: 2006-12-20 Karel Kulhavy). Under Ubuntu 9.10, this is what worked for building

sudo apt-get install xutils-dev libxt-dev libxmu-dev libxaw7-dev
wget http://ronja.twibright.com/utils/vncrec-twibright.tgz
tar xzvf vncrec-twibright.tgz
cd vncrec-twibright/
xmkmf
make World

There are executables built for 9.10 on http://sourceforge.net/projects/sdaaubckp/files/; if vncrec, vncpasswd, vncconnect are in the same folder, the following commands work:

# record
./vncrec -record sample.vncrec localhost:5921
# play
./vncrec -play sample.vncrec
# transcode
./vncrec -movie sample.vncrec | ./ffmpeg2theora.linux --no-audio -o sample.ogv -

Note, in above example, [http://v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora/ ffmpeg2theora] is used for transcoding.

Installation

VNCREC is not available in the standard Ubuntu repositories so you will need to download it from the home page.

Recording process

Start VNC server.

In Ubuntu this may be integral to the desktop and can be found under System --> Administration --> Remote Desktop which starts a VNC server called 'vino'. This exposes the current desktop over VNC. Be careful not to attach to this local VNC server in the current session because you will end up trying to control the desktop, controlling the desktop, controlling the desktop. The effect is a bit like pointing a video camera at the TV when you're showing the output of the camera on the TV. Quite pretty and amusing for a while but utterly useless unless you're remaking a 1970's pop video.

Alternatively it's possible to start a VNC server manually. The following command line assumes that the vncserver package is installed from the universe repository. The command will start a vncserver in which an X session should be running along with your normal desktop envionment. It will be started on desktop 10 - choose any number other than zero as this is usually used by the built in VNC server (if running) as detailed above. This could be started on the local PC or on any remote machine that you have a network connection to.

vncserver --geometry 1024x76 :10

If it starts correctly you should see something like the following:-

To find out the other command line options for vncserver, use the following command:-

vncserver --help

Start VNCREC

Start the recording software and connect to the vncserver - wherever it is running. If you started the vncserver on the local machine then the following command line will start recording. If you used the built-in vino vncserver then you'll usually need to connect to desktop number 0, not 10 as shown below. If you started the vncserver on a remote machine then replace localhost with the hostname or IP address of the remote computer. Beware that any firewalls between you and the remote machine will need to have port 59xx open - where xx is the two digit desktop number (10 in the case above).

vncrec -record localhost:10

Convert .vnc file

The main page for vncrec claims that transcode (which is in the Ubuntu repository) can convert a .vnc file to other formats.

Tips: If you have only one computer, create a second user under which you will do the demos, and run vncserver from there, but record by running vnrec using your normal user.