Creating Screencasts without byzanz

[weha]

Don't know precisely where to post this, but it may be useful as byzanz is not available and won't function in kde.
Anyway to make gif screencasts is easy.

First install these packages if not already installed:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick mplayer recordmydesktop.

Then use Desktop Recorder to capture a portion of the screen/application to use as the screencast. After the Desktop Recorder has saved the recording into an OGV video, MPlayer will be used to capture JPEG screenshots, saving them into the 'output' directory.

In a terminal:
mplayer -ao null out.ogv -vo jpegutdir=output

Use ImageMagick to convert the screenshots into an animated gifs.
convert output/* output.gif

You can optimize the screenshots this way: (You can adjust the fuzz %)
convert output.gif -fuzz 10% -layers Optimize optimised.gif

Another way to optimize gif is to use gifsicle: gifsicle -O in.gif -o out.gif

There are many options for gifsicle usage, eg.
gifsicle --optimize -d20 --colors 256 in.gif > animation.gif)

[perspectoff]

Also see this section from Kubuntuguide:

http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Screencasts