Whether it’s for recording your gaming or for desktop application tutorials, Michael Reed looks at five apps that can record screen activity.
HOW WE TESTED…
We installed each of the apps in what we felt was the most appropriate manner, but also checked to see if other methods were available. We ran each of the applications in order to create the type of video file that would be suitable for creating screencast tutorials. Here, it’s important to test that the default codec settings work on a typical Linux desktop system, in this case, Ubuntu.
These applications control standard audio and video codecs, so their performance should be fairly similar. We tested each program to make sure that when recording it wasn’t consuming an unreasonable amount of CPU time. Where applications can get ahead in terms of performance is if they take advantage of hardware acceleration, which can be a complicated topic. You might get lucky and find that the codec library is taking advantage of your hardware, but it’s better to have full support in the software itself so that you can troubleshoot and optimise it.