RecordScreen.py is a simple command-line front end to recording screencasts with ffmpeg or avconv from libav. The ffmpeg and avconv command-line options for this are a bit tricky, so this script aims to present a more convenient and pleasant command-line experience.
To record your entire desktop to the file output_file.mkv with default settings, enter this at the command line:
recordscreen.py output_file.mkv
When you are finished recording, you can either press q or hit Ctrl-C to stop. Note that if no output file is specified it will create a file in the current directory with the name out_####.mkv, where #### is a number that is incremented to avoid overwriting any existing files.
By default, recordscreen.py records at 15fps. You can change that with the -r flag. For example, to record at 30fps:
recordscreen.py -r 30 output_file.mkv
Similarly, the default video and audio codecs are h.264 and aac, respectively. To use something else, you can do this:
recordscreen.py --vcodec=vp8 --acodec=pcm output_file.mkv
You can save to a different container format simply by changing the file extension of the output file:
recordscreen.py output_file.mp4
The available containers are: avi, mp4, mov, mkv, ogv, and webm.
There are other options available as well, such as recording only part of the screen. All options are documented in the help:
recordscreen.py --help