There was once a plugin for Beryl that worked with this. But since Beryl became Compiz, the developer of the screencast plugin found migrating to Compiz too difficult. Work ceased on that plugin. So I tried a bevy  of applications until I managed to get gtk-recordMyDesktop to work.

Installing the app

Installing the app was simple. Since Elive Compiz is a Debian based operating system it was just a matter of issuing the command (as root):

apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop

Once the application was installed I found it in the Video menu of the E17 Applications menu.

You can also install gtk-recordmydesktop by doing a search for it in your Add/Remove Software utility.

Running the app

Main Window

When you open up gtk-recordmydesktop the main window will open. As you can see (in the image to the left) the window immediately begins grabbing your root desktop window.

What you do from here is select the window you want to grab. When you click the “Select Window” button your cursor will turn into a fat “+” symbol when your cursor hovers over the window displaying the screen. What you want to do is click and drag that cursor over the section of the desktop you want to record. If you want to record the entire desktop you select the entire desktop.

Once you’ve done that you click “Record” and the gtk-recordmydesktop window will minimize. In the case of Elive Compiz it will minimize to a small red dot at the bottom left of your screen. This small red dot is what you click when you are finished recording.

Problems

When I created a video of Elive Compiz, with the default settings, the playback was so bad it

Advanced Settings

wasn’t viewable. The defaults settings could grab all of the 3D effects. In order to get this to work I had to configure two options. To get to this options click the Advanced button from the main window. A new window will open (as shown in the image to the right) where you configure all advanced settings. Click on the Performance tab. There are two settings to change. The first setting is the Frames Per Second. The highest you can set this is 50, so max that baby out.

The next setting is the “Full shots at every frame”. You need to enable this in order to capture any 3D effects. It should be auto-enabled when any compositing is use. In my case this did not happen.

Once you have made these changes, click the Advanced button again to get rid of the settings window. Now when you record your Compiz-enabled desktop you should have decent output.

Output

The output of gtk-recordmydesktop is Ogg Vorbis Video (ogv). If you need to convert that format you can use a command-line tool like ffmpeg to covert to mpg like so:

ffmpeg -i input_filename.ogv ouput_filename.mpg

The quality of the ogv format is going to be much better than the mpg format when converted. There are ffmpeg settings you can tweak to try to raise the quality of your output. Play around with that to see how you can eek out the best quality. To get a peek at what both gtk-recordmydesktop and Elive Compiz can do, check out the sample video link I created below.

elive_compiz_small1

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There are many reasons why you should give this distribution a try. One of the reasons is that even when using the Live CD you can get the full benefit of what this distribution is all about. Even using a three year old machine I didn’t feel like I was using a Live CD. It’s that well put together.

How Did They Do It?

It’s been known for a while that Compiz and Enlightenment wouldn’t work together. The developers have been asked over and over to roll Compiz support into Enlightenment. It wasn’t until Elive developer Thanatermesis put in the necessary time to develop a special version of Ecomorph which consists of a special version of Compiz and a special version of E17 that are able to work together. As of now the developers claim this is nothing more than a “hack” and in pre-alpha stages. What I have seen, however, is pretty stable. That doesn’t mean you should be putting this version of Elive on your production machines. This version should be going on a machine that can be wiped clean whenever you choose. But you should definitely put it on something…it’s that cool.

What It Contains

Upon first glance of this distribution you would think you using E17 with maybe a few extra applets on the desktop. That is not the case. The minute you hit Ctrl-Alt with a left mouse click you will see that famous 3D cube brought to the desktop care of Compiz. A little more digging and you will find some rather interesting (and very alpha released) video applications as well as some spiffy configuration tools.

There was one effect with this desktop that really caught me by surprise. When you close a window the window folds into a paper airplane and flys away. Useful? Not really. Impressive? Very.

Graphic Requirements

Obviously this is one of the first questions you will have to ask. On the site they highly recommend an NVidia card. I ran the LiveCD on an NVidia 6800 GT and it was smooth as silk.

Have a Look

There is a great video on Youtube that shows off the Elive Compize release. Take a look here. In this video you will notice Elive Compiz running on an Eee PC. You can use the fantastic UNetBootin tool to install Elive Compiz onto a USB drive and get it working on an Eee PC.

Final Thoughts

If you are looking for a Debian-based distribution that takes the PC desktop to heights you have never experienced, Elive Compize is the Live CD for you. Just remember, while this is in such early stages, to not run this on a production machine.

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