Filling my Technological Void|Learning to Adapt to new Technology…… The Hard Way.

I’ve been busy for the past few days ( read as slacking off). Anyway I thought of sharing this video of me using Compiz Fusion on my Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon Desktop. To record the movie I used the software called gtk-recordmydesktop. Then used the command ffmpeg to convert my video to a size which I cold upload easily. Although converting it did come with a noticeable degrade in quality of the video. But in my defense theres no way I’m ever going to be able to upload a 300 MB video for 5 minutes on my Desktop. You can also access my video here.

Heres the steps I used for the process. First lets install both the required software.

sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

Once you have them installed you can record your video by clicking Applications > Sound and Video > gtk-recordmydesktop.

You can change the filename by clicking on Save As and then settign the location and the file name to your choice. Now all you have to do is click on record and it will record anything that happens on your desktop to the file. Once you are done recording then you can start recording by clicking on the record button. You can end the recording by clicking the little button which is now in your system tray (or whatever it is called in Ubuntu ). You can see the button in the below image.

Once you do that you should get the screen shown below.

You do not want to close this screen. If you do close this screen out you will lose the video that you were just recording and the encoding stops. Once the encoding is done you should find the file at the place where it was set to be saved at or in your home folder. You will see that if you were recording your whole desktop the size will be quite big. you can convert the video to a smaller size by using the command ffmpeg. For my video I used the following command.

ffmpeg -i compiz.ogg -s 4cif to.mpg
You can check the man pages for detailed help about the ffmpeg command.

The effects in the Video I have used above are given below.
Compiz Fusion Effects
Splash
Compiz Benchmark
Desktop Cube
Rotate Cube
Cube Reflection
Cube Caps
Expo
Scale
Animations
3D Windows
Water Effect
Wobbly Windows
Snow
Window Preview
Scale
Ring Switcher
Shift Switcher

I’ve been using the 64 bit version of Ubuntu for about 3-4 months now. Considering that it has been satisfying my needs I’m pretty happy with it. I’ve also managed tog et quite a few people to try out Ubuntu as well. Recently one of my friends said that he would try out Ubuntu if I could get is favorite game to work on it which happens to be Call of Duty 4 : Modern Warfare. So I set out to see if Wine could be used to play COD4 (Call of Duty 4) on Ubuntu 64 bit Gutsy Gibbon.

I must say that although the process was kind of scary I managed to pull it off and finally get it to work. In fact here is a screenshot of it in game.

Before continuing I must say that the process is kind of scary for a person new to Linux and that you wont be able to get the best of graphic quality. As you can see the above is set to Low on my machine and it has a 8600 GT as a display card with 2 GB of RAM and a AMD x2 4400 Processor. I found that at low settings it was definitely playable. I would post a movie but unfortunately I haven’t exactly found out how glc works as of yet, which is a Fraps alternative for Linux. Anyway for the process to do this on your 64 bit machine read on.

Read the rest of this entry »