Using recordmydesktop to create partial files of the recording

Question

I need to use recordmydesktop to record a six days conference. Every day there is a 3 hour seminar that I need to record. I need 2 things:

1. automatically start and finish the recording (using command line tools would be ok, that important thing is that I can specify the area to record)
2. create every 15 minutes a partial file. Basically I do not want to have at the end a 20GB file. I want to create 15minutes files.

n.2 is the most important feature I need. I will consider as correct answer the suggestion of an alternative (even on Windows platform) as long as it could satisfy both my requirements.

Answer 1

Have you tried GTK-Recordmydesktop? Is a front end for it.

With it (probably also with command line version) you can select an area of the screen to capture, very easily. (tutorial here) (you can do the same by commandline, specifying offset and width/height parameters. A bit more tedious, though)

On the file size issue. You can lower the quality slider in the GTK gui. (there's a command line parameter for this), mark "encode on the fly", and unmark zero compression. And do a small test to find the lower quality you can use. FPS, frames per second captured, also vary the file size, but it can end up in a "jumpy" motion... Another option is just record it all, then use these tools for splitting the file.

Obviously I guess just pausing the file and then restarting is not an option...

BTW, the software actually saves temp files, I think in chunks of 500mb, calling them img.out or something like that. With a recent "repair" function you can recover crashed session chunks. Might be this be a way to somehow re-create the chunks...An starting point, at least.