Screencasting with OpenBSD

USB Audio

Any USB microphone should appear as a new audio device. Here is the dmesg for my mic by ART

uaudio0 at uhub0 port 2 configuration 1 interface 0 "M-One USB" rev 1.10/0.01 addr 2
uaudio0: audio rev 1.00, 8 mixer controls
audio1 at uaudio0

audioctl can read off all of the specific characterisitcs of this device

$ audioctl -f /dev/audio1 | grep record
mode=play,record
record.rate=48000
record.channels=1
record.precision=16
record.bps=2
record.msb=1
record.encoding=slinear_le
record.pause=0
record.active=0
record.block_size=1960
record.bytes=0
record.errors=0

Now test the recording from the second audio device using aucat

aucat -f rsnd/1 -o file.wav

If the device also has a headset audio can be played through the same device.

aucat -f rsnd/1 -i file.wav

Screen Capture using Xvfb

The rate at which a framebuffer for your video card is a feature of the hardware and software your using, and it's often very slow. x11vnc will print an estimate of the banwidth for the system your running.

x11vnc
...
09/05/2012 22:23:45 fb read rate: 7 MB/sec

This is about 4fps. We can do much better by using a virtual framebuffer. Here I'm setting up a new screen, setting the background color, starting cwm and a terminal

Xvfb :1 -screen 0 720x540x16 &
DISPLAY=:1 xsetroot -solid steelblue &
DISPLAY=:1 cwm &
DISPLAY=:1 xterm +sb -fa Hermit -fs 14 &

Much better! Now we're up around 20fps.

x11vnc -display :1  &
...
11/05/2012 18:04:07 fb read rate: 168 MB/sec

Make a connection to this virtual screen using raw encoding to eliminate time wasted on compression.

vncviewer localhost -encodings raw

A test recording with sound then looks like this

ffmpeg -f sndio -i snd/1 -y -f x11grab -r 12 -s 800x600 -i :1.0 -vcodec ffv1 ~/out.avi

Stop the recording and playback by pressing q

Screen Capture using Xephyr

Xephyr is perhaps the easiest way to run X with a shadow framebuffer. This solution also avoids reading from the video card's RAM, so it's reasonably fast.

Xephyr -ac -br -noreset -screen 800x600 :1 &
DISPLAY=:1 xsetroot -solid steelblue &
DISPLAY=:1 cwm &
DISPLAY=:1 xrdb -load ~/.Xdefaults &
DISPLAY=:1 xterm +sb -fa "Hermit" -fs 14 &

Capture works in exactally the same way. This command tries to maintain 12fps.

ffmpeg -f sndio -i snd/1 -y -f x11grab -r 12 -s 800x600 -i :1.0 -vcodec ffv1 -acodec copy ~/out.avi

To capture keyboard and mouse input press Ctrl+Shift This is very handy for using navigating a window manager in the nested X session.

Arranging Windows

I have sometimes found it helpful to launch applications and arrange them in a specific way. This will open up a web browser listing the current directory and position windows using xdotool

DISPLAY=:1 midori "file:///`pwd`" &
sleep 2
DISPLAY=:1 xdotool search --name "xterm" windowmove 0 0
DISPLAY=:1 xdotool search --class "midori" windowmove 400 0
DISPLAY=:1 xdotool search --class "midori" windowsize 400 576

This will position the window precisely so that it appears to be in a tmux window on the right.

Audio/Video Sync

If you find that the audio is way out of sync with the video, you can ajust the start using the -ss before the audio input to specify the number of seconds to delay. My final recording command line, that delays the audio by 0.5 seconds, writing 12fps

ffmpeg -ss 0.5 -f sndio -i snd/1 -y -f x11grab -r 12 -s 800x600 -i :1.0 -vcodec ffv1  -acodec copy ~/out.avi

Sharring a Terminal with tmux

If you're trying to record a terminal session, tmux is able to share a session. In this way a recording of an X framebuffer can be taken without even using the screen. Start by creating the session

tmux -2 -S /tmp/tmux0

Then on the remote side connect on the same socket

tmux -2 -S /tmp/tmux0 attach

Taking Screenshots

Grabbing a screenshots on Xvfb server is easily accomplished with ImageMagick's import command

DISPLAY=:1 import -window root screenshot.png

Audio Processing and Video Transcoding

The first step is to ensure that the clip begins and ends where you'd like it to. The following will make a copy of the recording starting at time 00:00 and ending at 09:45

ffmpeg -i interactive-sql.avi \
    -vcodec copy -acodec copy
    -ss 00:00:00 -t 00:09:45
    interactive-sql-trimmed.avi
mv interactive-sql-trimmed.avi interactive-sql.avi

Setting the gain correctly is very important with an analog mixer, but if you're using a USB mic there may not be a gain option; simply record using it's built-in settings and then adjust the levels afterwards using a utility such as normalize. First extact the audio as a raw PCM file and then run normalize

ffmpeg -i interactive-sql.avi -c:a copy -vn audio.wav
normalize audio.wav

Next merge the audio back in again

ffmpeg -i interactive-sql.avi -i audio.wav \
    -map 0:0 -map 1:0 -c copy interactive-sql-normalized.avi

The final step is to compress the screencast for distribution. Encoding to VP8/Vorbis is easy:

ffmpeg -i interactive-sql-normalized.avi -c:v libvpx -b:v 1M
    -c:a libvorbis -q:a 6 interactive-sql.webm

H.264/AAC is tricky. For most video players the color space needs to be set to yuv420p. The -movflags puts the index data at the beginning of the file to enable streaming/partial content requests over HTTP:

ffmpeg -y -i interactive-sql-normalized.avi -c:v libx264 \
    -preset slow -crf 14 -pix_fmt yuv420p -movflags +faststart \
    -c:a aac -q:a 6 interactive-sql.mp4

Eric Radman : a Journal