Over at Meta Redux, Bozhidar Batsov, who will need no introduction to Emacs users, has a nice post on how to make a screencast from within Emacs. The result is actually an animated GIF but the results in his demo video look very good. The nice thing about his method is that it takes a screen capture only when you do something so the resulting files are smaller and there are no pauses when you’re not doing something.
The screencasts are made with the emacs-gif-screencast package that’s available on Melpa. You’ll need a couple of extra packages as well: Imagemagick and Gifsicle both of which are available on HomeBrew for MacOS users and are probably already installed on Linux—if not prebuilt binaries or source are available at the above links.
There are a few weaknesses, which Batsov discusses but nothing serious and he concludes that it’s a “pretty cool tool” so if you’re looking for any easy way to make a screencast from within Emacs you should definitely give it a look. You won’t be able to make the type of video that, say, Mike Zamansky produces but if you need a quick screencast to demo some process, emacs-gif-screencast is ideal.