Suppose you want to make a screencast, and upload the video to Youtube. This doesn't sound to hard to do. But I went through a lot of troubles before it actually worked. So I decided to write this down, in case someone else runs into the same problems. I am using Debian Sid.

There are several packages available for creating a screencast, and I first tried xvidcap. But when trying to record the sound as well, I got the message ‘Error accessing sound input from /dev/dsp’. I did some Googling, but I couldn't find an easy workaround.

So for my next attempt, I used Istanbul. This allowed me to create screencasts with sound, but when uploading the file to Youtube, Youtube complained about an unrecognized file format. Damn.

Again, if you Google the problem, you will find some tips, but none of them worked for me.

At last, after some trial and error, it seems that openshot can do the trick. Create a video project with openshot, import the ogg-video from Istanbul, put the video on the first track, and export the result again with the predefined web template. This creates a .mov-file, which youtube will happily show.