Screencasting the Creator

I'm trying out Nokia's fancy new Qt Creator IDE for developing Qt 4.5 applications. Looks pretty nice, even if Qt itself is a little fugly, given all the weird macros it uses to get its work done. Maybe this IDE will shield me from the worst of it?

Anyway, I'm going through the recommended book (C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4, Second Edition) on Safari and am finding it a bit of a chore. It is working with the older GUI design tool, Qt Designer, and not Qt Creator. As far as I can tell, there isn't much introduction material for Qt Creator. So I'll try and puzzle out the answer to some of the oddities and document them here.

So what I've done is create my very first screencast! I am using recordMyDesktop via its GUI interface qt-recordmydesktop, which works pretty well. I had the usual audio hassles, trying to figure out how to set up the mic for recording. I could never get it to use my USB headset, but luckily this lovely Plantronics USB headset comes with regular 3.5mm jacks that plug into a USB adapter, so by plugging the jacks into the back of the audio board, I could get it to record after trying various options in KMixer.

Coincidentally enough, the most recent issue of Linux Format magazine has a Roundup of screencasting tools. Their pick is the closed source DemoRecorder but it doesn't seem to offer anything that the free recordMyDesktop offers besides the ablity to save in multiple formats. recordMyDesktop only does Ogg Vorbis video, but all the upload sites convert it to Flash video anyway, so I don't really care.

I had a few problems getting the screencast to work. First off is a bug in Qt Creator, where if you rename the main widget, the compiler gets all weirded out. Took me a while to figure that one out. The workaround is to rename it from the Project creation dialog.

Then I was having problems getting the post-recording conversion to work. It would only do some of it, or not a complete audio track. Not sure what the work around was for that. I either got lucky finally or, by just leaving the computer alone until the process was done made it work. Finally, I got the 6 minute screencast to work.

I am using blip.tv to host the video. I've heard it does the best job at conversion and has the fewest restrictions on formats, as well as giving the most options for display. So, without further ado, is my very first screencast: