To record a VNC session to a movie in ShockWave Flash format (SWF) you
can use an open source tool called vnc2swf. It is
available for download at http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf.
My tips from installation on Ubuntu 6.0.6 LTS:
The C version seems to be difficult to compile.
Unless you want
to spend hours on debugging, download the Python version.
It has just two dependencies (python, python-game) which are easy to
resolve. All you have to do then is to unzip the vnc2swf archive and
execute the binaries. Documentation of the Python version is at http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/pyvnc2swf.html.
The tool connects to the VNC server as an
additional independent VNC viewer. It means that anyone can
connect the recorder to a VNC session and record it and there's
no need to setup any proxy server. Note that all VNC viewers connecting
to the session should run in the shared mode (xvncviewer -shared)
I experienced a documented bug which causes
minor corruption of
the recorded movie. I got rid of it by requesting a full screen refresh
from my VNC viewer at the beginning of each recorded session (the steps
in xvncviewer are to press F8 and select "Request
refresh" from the
menu). This step is not captured in the demo below.
Though it is not recommended for performance
reasons, I used
recording into the "video" format. I tried other formats but I
experienced some difficulties to convert the file from other supported
formats to SWF using the edit.py script.
The demo below shows how to download, install and run the tool on Linux
and how
to generate a simple SWF movie from a short VNC session. It presumes
that you've already installed the dependencies (python and python-game
packages) on your machine.
