It would be far better, when making a screencast of free software, to record the screencast in an open format that can be viewed with free software. Currently Flash is a proprietary format, with very poor free software support.

The tool Istanbul can record a screencast in the free, open Ogg Theora format, which can then be viewed by anyone without proprietary software.

Ben - good point. I guess if I'm showing how to make flash screencasts, I should include pointers for how to view them on non-x86 hardware.

Thanks for the link to Istanbul. To your point, I would probably need to create some howtos for windows folks and mac folks for getting Theora working on their machine. Flash is nice in that 99% of the world can view it for free (as in beer). (I guess I'm not a purist, I still rip to mp3...) (I too have mixed feelings on flash. But I have adblock installed so I only view the flash videso I want to, not annoying punch the monkey ads).

What about byzanz? Are gif-casts kosher? (of course then you don't get sound)...

Hi Matt, you might be interested in our http://ShowMeDo.com - free screencasts of (mostly) Python tools showing users how to do new things. Each video has a speech track.

Currently we've used HyperCam on Windows for all 19 of the videos, though one of our users has asked for a how-to with vnc2swf (http://showmedo.com/requests). Perhaps we could have a chat? (I'd love to say Hi but I can't see an email link!). I'm on ian AT showmedo.com.

What?!?!?!? You don't punch the monkey? How on earth are you going to get a free iPod without punching a few monkeys first?

You might want to try using x11vnc rather then vncserver for use with pyvnc2swf, it doesn't require starting vncserver, it runs on the current local desktop and is a much better solution.

With ffmpeg installed, you can capture the desktop, caprture the audio, convert it, and merge it together with one script that I made. It isn't very pretty, and just strings the commands together but the finished product is great, and only requires one click of the mouse.

Here is the text of the script I use.

• #!/bin/sh

x11vnc -localhost -viewonly -wait 10 -defer 10 &

python ~/Documents/pyvnc2swf-0.8.2/vnc2swf.py -o tutorial.swf -N -S "arecord -c 2 -f cd -t wav voice.wav" localhost:0

ffmpeg -i voice.wav -ar 22050 voice.mp3

python ~/Documents/pyvnc2swf-0.8.2/edit.py -o tutorial1.swf -a voice.mp3 tutorial.swf

mv ~/tutorial1.swf ~/tutorial.swf

rm ~/voice.wav

rm ~/voice.mp3

rm ~/tutorial1.html

Here is <a href="http://www.len.ro/work/tools/ubuntu-feisty-fawn-on-a-de ll-latitude-d820/screencasts-with-xvidcap/view">an example</a> on how to create a screencast using xvidcap and then stream a flv file.