When running one of my favourite games on my favorite Linux distro, Ubuntu, i thought i might as well capture the moment for prosperity. After a bit of searching around, i figured the best tool to use was recordMyDesktop.

What i wanted to do was:

• Record video from the game window
• Record sound being outputted from the game (at the same time)

Which to be quite honest, i thought would be easy – not!

First impressions

Upon loading the tool, (or rather as it turns out, its graphical front-end) i figured recording video was simple enough. After selecting the game window and hitting record, i eventually decided i had recorded enough video. Which was when i encountered my first problem – how on earth do i stop recording?

Sadly there was no sign of any way of stopping the recording. Until i noticed the system tray, which contained another icon which i hadn’t seen before. Can you guess which one it was?

Anyhow, after managing to stop recording, this nice dialog box popped up saying it was encoding the video, and soon enough i had my video file.

The nightmare begins

Upon playing my video file, i noticed that whilst i had video, there was no sound. Although upon closer inspection it turned out that it had recorded sound from the microphone, which i didn’t want. I wanted it to record sound outputted from the game. Surely it can’t be that hard, right?

Allow me to introduce the preferences dialog (confusingly enough named the same as the main window). It contains some tabs, which i named “The 4 Tabs of Certain Horror”. Horrific as whilst they contain all the switches, it doesn’t really help you. In fact, i would argue it makes everything twice as difficult as just using the command line version, as most of the time you are either:

• Left typing in cryptic strings and file paths into text boxes
• Peeking through combo box controls unveiling mystery meat options
• Waiting for magical tool tips to pop up which while presenting useful information quickly vanish if you move your mouse to cross-reference with anything else

The option i presumed i needed to change was “Sound Device”. However, much to my horror, it was just a text box. I had no idea what i was really meant to type in it, let alone what it meant. The tool tip haiku said “ALSA Sound device, that is used for recording.” – which to be honest didn’t help me in the slightest.

Sadly, after looking around the needle in a haystack the internet is, i didn’t find a solution which worked. In the end, i just gave up. The nice tool with its front-end was supposed to help, but in the end it did the opposite.

Suggestions for improvement

I tend to think that front-ends for tools should ultimately do the following:

• Provide an interface for changing options
• Abstract options correctly where possible to simplify usage
• Help the user rather than making them work harder to figure everything out

For recordMyDesktop, i would suggest the following:

• Name the preferences dialog something like “recordMyDesktop Options”.
• Provide a way of selecting the working directory using a friendly file selection dialog.
• Allow the user to select the input ALSA sound device from a nice list (like the Jack capture list).
• Remove unnecessary options (e.g. why would i need to change my “Display” option?).
• Use check boxes instead of combo boxes for selecting “yes/no” options.
• Instead of using tool tips to explain each option to the user, have a little text summary below each option.
• Be a bit more imaginative with representing some of the options (e.g. why not make the “Mouse Cursor” option be a little list of graphical representations of the cursor to choose from?).
• Make “Select Window” track the selected window when you move it around from the original position.

Of course, ultimately i would like to be able to do what i originally set out to do: record some darn video with sound. I guess i’ll just have to wait.