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Comment by thih9 | Hacker News Reader

Offtopic, looks like the easiest way to record a screencast with sound from the machine was to film it with another device.

This is not a jab at linux, I wouldn't know how to do that with MacOS either; the default Cmd+Shift+5 video capture tool doesn't allow recording internal sound.

I'm surprised that in 2022 this task can still be so problematic.

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> I wouldn't know how to do that with MacOS either; the default Cmd+Shift+5 video capture tool doesn't allow recording internal sound.

>If you would like to screen record on your Mac with audio, you can use the QuickTime Player provided by Apple. Select it from your applications folder and then go to File > New Screen Recording from the top menu bar.

https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/screen-record-on-mac-with-soun...

If you want to record sound generated by the computer itself only (not the microphone), you can use a tool like BlackHole [1].

BlackHole adds a loopback audio device which can be used with the default video capture tool (select the loopback device in the options menu after pressing shift-command-5).

To be able to play audio from the speakers while you're recording, you need to add a multi-output audio device in the macOS "Audio MIDI Setup" app. Switch to the multi-output device by option-clicking the audio icon in the top menu bar. Now both the speakers as well as the BlackHole audio device will receive audio.

[1]: https://github.com/ExistentialAudio/BlackHole

This is also really useful if you need to mute a Zoom call if you need to listen to something else (like an unrelated video). You can just temporarily set the Zoom audio output to the BlackHole device.

Recording has been built into Gnome for quite some time (ctrl+alt+shift+r), but with Gnome 40 it's got a nice UI and pops up with the screenshot tool (PrtSc). Though it doesn't do audio either.

Mac can do it easily if you setup SoundFlower.

https://rogueamoeba.com/freebies/soundflower/

Depends what you mean by easiest.

You can also use ffmpeg to create a "screencast" with sound and it's just a couple of extra command-line options. E.G. the options

  -f pulse -ac 2 -i default

work well for me.

Of course, if you don't know this or your machine's setup well, and you happen to have another device lying around, you're prone to pick it up and make the video that way instead.

Which may be harder because then you have to get the video off the other device somehow. Lol, epistemology is an interesting field.

I wouldn’t read much into it. I’ve had many people send me “screenshots” taken with their phone. The phone camera has become the goto tool for anything visual for many people.

Because it's convenient. Everyone knows how to use their phone's camera and click on "share". A screenshot involves more steps unless you know what you're doing and are already logged into Twitter. And screenshots on Android phones are often just painful.

pressing volume and power at the same time is painful?

It's so untypically cumbersome and unintuitive for a smartphone UI that to me it doesn't feel like a feature intended for end users. The button combination isn't always consistent from one phone to the next and afaik there's no way to know the right one without googling it or trying out a few variants. If you get the combination or timing wrong you probably changed some audio setting or locked the screen. Sometimes it's easier but in general it feels more like trying to enter BIOS settings on a random computer - it's basically the same procedure as entering a smartphone's or Surface Pro's bootloader menu.

Installed obs studio on my wayland+pipewire machine and it just worked. Full screen capture with multiple audio sources simultaneously.

There are very cheap USB HDMI capture sticks on the market that I use for this. Works great on all platforms!

OBS Studio can do it on Windows.

It’s more dramatic. A screencast would feel synthetic.

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