Kazam v1.5.x "NX-72307"Kazam is a simple screen recording program that will capture the content of your screen and record a video file that can be played by any video player that supports VP8/WebM video format.
Optionally you can record sound from any sound input device that is supported and visible by PulseAudio.
Kazam is always available from Launchpad under https://launchpad.net/kazam
Latest stable release is 1.4.4. Latest unstable release is 1.5.0
If you are using Ubuntu 14.04 then stable version (1.4.4) is available from universe repository. You can find it in Ubuntu Softare Center or install it from the terminal with the following command:
$ sudo apt-get install kazam
For other Ubuntu based distributions the best way to install Kazam is to add a PPA repository and then use apt-get command or Software Center.
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kazam-team/stable-series $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install kazam
For distribution independent installation you will have to get the latest tarball release from Launchpad:
http://launchpad.net/kazam/stable/1.4.4/+download/kazam_1.4.4.tar.gz
Unpack it and then run setup:
$ tar -xzf kazam_1.4.4.tar.gz $ cd kazam-1.4.4
Run installation as root user, or use sudo:
Installing current unstable build from a PPA can be done by adding unstable series PPA.
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kazam-team/unstable-series $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install kazam
If you want bleeding edge, development version then you will have to get source code from Launchpad by running the following command:
$ bzr branch lp:kazam/unstable
Then you need to run setup.py to build and install Kazam:
$ cd kazam
You will have to run setup as root user or use sudo. Default installation path is /usr/local.
If you want to run Kazam from the source tree, there are a few limitations that you have to take into account. Every icon has to be taken from currently installed icon theme. Toolbars will not show any icons and you will not see Unity AppIndicator.
To run Kazam simply execute te following commands in the source tree:
$ cd bin $ ./kazam
If you already have Kazam installed then Kazam icons will be displayed properly.
SUPER-CTRL-Q - Quit SUPER-CTRL-W - Show/Hide main window SUPER-CTRL-R - Start Recording SUPER-CTRL-F - Finish Recording
Keyboard shortcuts will work on Precise Pangolin only if you installed Kazam 1.4.x from the PPA, keybinder 3.0 is a dependency and will be installed automatically.
For Ubuntu 12.10 and newer keyboard binder is available in the universe repositories and there is no need to use PPA to get keybinder installed.
Framerates above 20fps are unlikely to work well because of software and hardware limitations. If you increase framerate and framerate in resulting video drops, that is because encoder can't keep up.
Always do a sound check. Especially if you are recording a live commentary with background sound. I got the best results when I used earphones to listen to the audio while recording. This way your mic will not pick up any audio coming from speakers.
If you really want loss-less quality, then you will have to record in RAW format. This is possible, but without an SSD with a lot of free space your results will be terrible. 1920x1080 at 15 frames per second will need around 45 MB of disk space per second. Most people will want to record at 20 or 25 frames per second. Most disk will not handle that and your system will start to crawl.
Your next best bet is HUFFYUV format, which is a little bit friendlier on disk bandwidth with 28 MB per second at 15 frames per second. The problem? Not many video editors and players can handle HUFFYUV, let alone video sharing services.
New countdown timer will work correctly only if you have pycairo 1.10.1 installed. Ubuntu 14.04 ships with 1.10.0. Unstable PPA for kazam currently provides the latest pycairo. This version of pycairo is untested and it might happen that other things will break if you install it.
Trouble with recording audio from certain Monitor sources. I noticed this with Logitech G110 USB Keyboard that can play audio. Pulse Audio will see two devices: USP PnP Stereo Device and 'Monitor of USB PnP Stereo Device'. When recording from the monitor, volume controls for both devices will affect the volume in the final recording.
I have no idea where to put Mute/Unmute button, so right now every audio source you select is automatically unmuted.
It was reported that sound is disappearing after couple of minutes into the recording. I wasn't able to reproduce this bug and any more info is appreciated. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/kazam/+bug/933835 for more details.
Two memory leaks were noticed, one with VP8 encoder and one with Intel graphics cards. Still investigating if this is a driver, Xorg or GStreamer problem.
Non compositing window managers are not able to render transparent windows. Area selection and countdown timers will be affected by this. Mint users can turn on window compositing in Desktop Settings.
When taking a screenshot of a preselected window with window decorations you have to make sure that your window is not covered by other windows.
Mouse cursor is offseted by a number of pixels when capturing video of a pre-selected window. This is due to a GStreamer bug. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/kazam/+bug/1092339 and https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=690646 for more info.
Preliminary support for displaying keypresses and mouse clicks is done. It looks ugly and support is still clumsy it can also die and stop working. There are issues with dual screen setups.
Broadcast support is currenly in a very experimental stage. It will only work for YouTube Live. Support for Twitch is coming in the next updates. You will have to provide YouTube Live Stream and Server URL from custom made ingestion.
If you encounter a bug or any kind of unexpected behavior please try to reproduce it while you run Kazam from standard terminal with --debug option. Use Launchpad to report bugs (https://bugs.launchpad.net/kazam/+filebug) and include generated output.