How to record internal audio with XVidCap? (not with microphone)

I found the solution in this blog post:

1. Uninstall xvidcap in Synaptic
2. Install xvidcap from here on Sourceforge [editor's note - this is a very old version (deb is for Jaunty) - not recommended. I doubt this solution is still valid]
3. Lock the installed version in Synaptic
4. Install pavucontrol in Synaptic
5. Open the program with padsp xvidcap
6. Click on the recording button (red circle)
7. Run pavucontrol, go to the Recording tab and there choose Monitor of Analog Stereo Internal Audio

Done!!

To record with sound, the program has always to be run with padsp xvidcap (for example from ALT+F2). To run it always like that from the menu: run alacarte, go to Sound and video, then to XVidCap Screen Capture > Properties and where it says Command put padsp xvidcap.

I would add this:

The above is to record system sound, that is, whatever is coming out of the speakers, which can be of a song or movie of our hard drive or pendrive played by Totem, of a Flash music video of a website played by Firefox.

Nevertheless, sometimes it can be necessary to record the microphone sound, for example if we want to make a video tutorial to explain how a program works. In this case we put xvidcap in recording state, run pavucontrol and in the Recording tab we put Analog Stereo Internal Audio (without "Monitor of").

If we only want to record sound (without video) we can run from ALT+F2 gnome-sound-recorder. The first time probably it will be configured to record from the microphone. To record the system sound we run with ALT+F2 gnome-volume-control, go to the Hardware tab and in Profile we put Analog Stereo Output (it's also possible to do this running pavucontrol and using the Configuration tab).

But when we finish we have to put again Analog Stereo Duplex in the Profile of Hardware of gnome-volume-control (or of Configuration of pavucontrol), so we can still choose the origin of the sound when recording with xvidcap.

NB: sometimes, to change from Analog Stereo Duplex to Analog Stereo Output it may be necessary to change first to Off, close, open again and then change finally to Analog Stereo Output. The same for the opposite change. If not, the computer may "not notice" that we have applied the change.

Taken from this post on Ubuntu Forums

You need pavucontrol - from here, you can set Xvidcap to record from your internal audio.

To get XVidCap to be detected, you have to:

• first record a dummy video (I know, an annoying extra step)
• find XVidCap in pavucontrol, change it to record from the internal audio
• Stop recording in XVidCap, delete the dummy video
• Now record as normal
• You will not need to do this again if you keep your system on hibernate/sleep instead of restarting, but pulseaudio will not remember your settings if you restart your system.

If this doesn't work, try recording the audio in the background with gnome-sound-recorder, and then adding it to your video using Kdenlive, Pitivi, or Openshot.

For 64 bits: angel-de-vicente.blogspot.com/2011/03/screencasts-with-xvidcap-in-ubuntu-1004.html : In order to install it in my x86_64 system I just have to use the --force-architecture option to the dpkg -i command.

angelv@vaso:~/Desktop$ sudo dpkg --force-architecture -i xvidcap_1.1.7jaunty_i386.deb

But when trying to run it I see that there are some i386 libraries missing. In order to easily install them I use the getlibs script.

angelv@vaso:~/Desktop$ padsp xvidcap xvidcap: error while loading shared libraries: libtheora.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

angelv@vaso:~/Desktop$ getlibs /usr/bin/xvidcap

%%%%%%%%%%%%%

About getlibs: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=474790

After a video is recorded xvidcap offers to play it immediately. But if you click on the "Play" button the video is not reproduced.

This problem happens at least in Ubuntu 10.04 because by default it doesn't have installed mplayer, the program that xvidcap uses to play the videos when pressing on the stated button.

There are 2 solutions:

a) Install mplayer from Synaptic. or b) Go to preferences (right clicking on the name of the file, for example test-0000.mpeg, and then cliking on Preferences), then to the Commands tab, and then in the "Multi-Frame Capture Commands"' "Playback Command" replace mplayer with totem and click on OK. Then right click again on the name of the file and click on "Save preferences".

I struggled with this on 64bit Ubuntu - The downloads offer only i386 architecture, and I wasn't keen to force the architecture.

It's relatively simple to compile the offered source, and that also works with the padsp wrapper as per Friendien's answer.

Download the xvidcap-1.1.7.tar.gz file from the Sourceforge project above.

Extract the file (tar -xzf) then cd into the folder and run ./configure.

At this point you may have to install some extra software - I installed glade (for libglade2.0) and libxmu-dev.

Once configure has run, do

make

Then

sudo make install

Run it (as suggested) with

padsp xvidcap

and it's all good to go (for me, Ubuntu 11.04 64bit).

Another option, not to have to change once and again between Analog Stereo Duplex and Analog Stereo Output neither limit the sound source for xvidcap, is to leave Analog Stereo Duplex and use also pavucontrol when we want to change the source of the sound for gnome-sound-recorder. Like the stated for padsp xvidcap, to change where we want to record the sound from, we put gnome-sound-recorder recording, open pavucontrol and in the Recording tab we put the desired option. In this case there is no need to use padsp (xvidcap needs it because it was designed for OSS. What padsp does is to connect OSS with PulseAudio, as shown in http://linux.die.net/man/1/padsp ).

You can install Audio Recorder to record audio from the microphone or from the system: https://launchpad.net/~osmoma/+archive/audio-recorder