Screen record your desktop and audio sources FOR FREE!

Recently, I found out there's a software that you can pay for that will record your screen.

Sources:

For one, I am shocked at how anybody, somebody will pay for anything these days. I'm here to save you from the carpet munchers of your wallet and give you a cheaper alternative. It does require a little bit of thinking, so if you're like me and not afraid to use your brain for something other than how much something costs, then this is for you.

Free alternatives to these solutions include OBS which includes options for streaming to stuff like Twitch, YouTube, and even TikTok among a plethora of other built-in platforms. Oh, and it's also cross-platform, so doesn't matter if you're on Windows, OSX or Linux. I'm a personal huge fan of Linux and open-source software.

I also personally love using ffmpeg which is another cross-platform solution. It's command-line based so if that's your cup of tea, then you'll love the script I have to accompany it.

Checkout my Github Gist for the script.

Let's explore the script.

You can simply run it in the console as such:

x11grab

What this will do is kick off an ffmpeg process that will start to record the screen, the mic and whatever audio is coming out of the speakers and mesh them all together in /tmp/x11grab.mp4. If you want to control where this file is placed, you can set the environment variable AVOUTFILE. You can even do this in a 1-time execution like this:

AVOUTFILE=/home/markizano/Desktop/2024-11-20_screencap.mp4 x11grab

This will output the video on your desktop, for example.

Let's say I have a different microphone installed and want to use that instead of the built-in mic to my laptop (because of the hardware noise produced in the result). I can change this using the environment variable $PULSE_MIC_SOURCE as such:

AVOUTFILE=screencap.mp4 PULSE_MIC_SOURCE=alsa_input.usb-Focusrite_Scarlett_2i2_USB_Y8AN6AE31F77B4-00.analog-stereo x11grab

For example, I have the Scarlet2 Mic installed and wanted to record from that, so I would use this. You can see which sources you have available to you in Pulse audio using pactl list sources. That will output a table of information containing the sources and the names you can use for them.

I'll go over Pulse audio in more detail in another post.

For now, I just wanted to share and explain a little about my little x11grab script and how I make screen recording easier and free for me without all this paid software sending your data away, tracking you and further selling your information for advertisement purposes.

Happy coding!

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