Kazam Screencaster 1.0 Released

Kazam Screencaster 1.0, a cool screencasting application for Linux, has been released today.

The Kazam Screencaster development has stopped a while back, but luckily a new developer has taken over the project and Kazam is updated frequently again. With the new 1.0 version, Kazam is finally GTK3 ready, but that's not all. Here are the changes since the previous Kazam version we wrote about (a long time ago, I know):

• It's finally possible to record arbitrary screen regions
• Support for two audio channels, with volume settings
• Output can be saved in WebM or Matroska
• Uses gstreamer instead of ffmpeg
• Countdown timer is now customizable
• Countdown window has now variable width
• Adjustable framerate
• Ability to turn off recording of mouse cursor
• Audio device selection is now done directly from PulseAudio. To record application sounds instead of microphone input you will have to select one of the monitor devices.

Even though it uses an Ubuntu AppIndicator, Kazam works in other desktop environments too, like GNOME Shell for instance (GNOME Shell has a built-in recording tool which works great, but it doesn't let you select an arbitrary screen region), where it falls back to a regular tray icon.

And speaking of the cool region record option: Kazam lets you resize the region easily, unlike GTK-RecordMyDesktop for instance, in which selecting a region on the screen is quite difficult.

Unfortunately the resulting videos aren't so great at least on my computer, and it seems I'm not the only one. This is actually the reason I've used 10 for the framerate in the video above - using the default value of 25, the video was very choppy, with many skipped frames. Hopefully this will be fixed in a future release; until then, if the screencasts you create are choppy, try using a framerate of 10-15.

Here's a quick Kazam screencast I've recorded using... Kazam Screencaster:


If the video doesn't show up, click here.

Install Kazam in Ubuntu

Kazam 1.0 is available in its stable PPA for Ubuntu 11.10 and 12.04. To add the PPA and install it (Ubuntu Oneiric and Precise only!), use the commands below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kazam-team/stable-series
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install kazam

Other Linux distributions:

• Arch Linux users can install the latest Kazam from BZR via AUR.
• Get the source code from Launchpad.

Report any bugs you may find @ Launchpad.

Source