Recording Screencasts on Arch
Today I learned that there’s a trick to getting sound to work on Arch using recordmydesktop.
The Issue
yaourt -S recordmydesktop
recordmydesktop test.ogv
Was met with the classic error:
Couldn't open PCM device hw:0,0
Error while opening/configuring soundcard hw:0,0
Try running with the --no-sound or specify a correct device.
Troubleshooting
I tried passing all the devices from /dev/snd, and none of them worked.
To see whether a graphical UI might install some silent dependency, I installed qt-recordmydesktop and ran it. This failed to record in the same way as before, but an advanced settings tab mentioned that jackd was not running.
I then manually tried to start jack by invoking jackd at the command line, and hit a useful error message emitted by the sanity check.
The Fix
recordmydesktop was unable to work out of the box because the user as whom I invoked it was not a member of the audio group:
usermod -a -G audio username
made the error disappear, and now recordmydesktop works with the default device.
Epilogue
My first successful recording, test.ogv, is about 5 seconds of me wondering aloud where the program went, cursing at it, and typing loudly to killall recordmydesktop.