Update: I now use obs-studio for my videos!

This follows up from a blog on capturing video from HDMI

I’ve invested a lot of time, money and effort into screencasting from my Archlinux laptop.

Without going into minutiae, I’ll quickly run through the major obstacles to doing this.

The laptop’s microphone is unusable

Fixed by the Audio-Technica ATR2100-USB Cardioid Dynamic USB/XLR Microphone. However I find it difficult to mount in front of my mouth, where the best recordings are.

Obviously I can’t hold it, since I’m screencasting and I need two hands to type!

video4linux …. sucks

On the 4.x Linux kernel I have a lot of issues with /dev/video0 (typically Webcam) and /dev/video1 (typically GoPro attached via Magewell XI100DUSB-HDMI).

They can disappear, re-appear and cause also sorts of broken recordings. :(

ffmpeg -f v4l2 -list_formats all -i /dev/video1

There is no H264 encoding support from Intel on Linux

Intel’s hardware acceleration technology is called VAAPI and to cut a long story short.. has poor support on Linux.

hendry, if you want to use the intel hw encoder, install Windows. There are a lot of applications that support QSV for encoding. Handbrake for example.

This is my output from vainfo.

The gstreamer implementation at https://github.com/01org/gstreamer-vaapi/blob/master/gst/vaapi/gstvaapiencode_h264.c is said to be unstable.

The point is that libva for encoding is incredibly annoying to use, which is the reason why no usefull implementations exist.

Without hardware accelerated H264.. prepare to SKIP FRAMES. LOTS OF FRAMES

On my Broadwell Thinkpad X1C3 recording my desktop at 1920x1080 with a 1920x1080 overlay from my GoPro via V4L is a non-starter. Think of reducing the GoPro input to 640x480 maybe. Sample

Remember software encoding multiple video feeds plus audio is EXTREMELY CPU INTENSIVE. Your machine is unlikely to cope and the result will be jittery video which is unwatchable.

Workaround: Using MKV output format LOWERS my CPU LOAD! Which Youtube actually understands without taking another step to encode it into MP4.

And the Linux tooling sucks

To work out the optimal recording setup is a LOT OF HARD WORK. Especially since it can be difficult to grok the load, the skipped frames and the resulting FPS until you finished recording.

For best results, you probably just want to record separately however combining and syncing audio and video is an INCREDIBLY time intensive manual operation. The tooling sucks on Linux. Even on FCPX on MacOSX it takes a huge amount of time to do right.