Screencast creator

Do the following things:

Record a video
Record a video with sound
Record a video with or without sound and then edit it with a timeline to add on-screen notes
Record a video with sound and then edit it with a timeline to add on-screen notes and places to click where the video pauses until you click, like RapidBuilder -- requires capturing mouse click data when you record
Save to a file (Theora)
Publish to the web -- the central site
Publish to your own site
Crop the whole video like the Gimp
Start up an xnest with a gnome-session pointing to a separate place, which might be another user account and might be a fake user account created just for this. Not sure how to do that; setting $HOME doesn't work

The xnest could instead be a VNC session into an xvfb with the -fbdir option, which dumps screens in xwd format. Is there another way (other than VNC) to bring up another X session in a window? Xnest runs the server itself.

DOn't use gnome-session, instead just start the session myself. Nautilus uses g_get_home_dir to get my home dir, which ignores $HOME and gets it from /etc/passwd. I can override it with LD_PRELOAD:

muntyan well, just override g_get_home_dir if you like hacks :)
muntyan with LD_PRELOAD
aquarius winces
muntyan const char *g_get_home_dir() { return "/"; }
aquarius THis is where my total lack of C knowledge bites me ;)
aquarius I could do that?
muntyan yes
muntyan you make a lib containing that single function, or many functions, and do "LD_PRELOAD=thislib app"
aquarius and presumably I could have my little override program pick up the value from an envar as well. That'd be handy.
muntyan yes, you can write any code there
muntyan you can use glib there
muntyan you just can't use original function
muntyan (or you need to dlopen original lib...)
aquarius Stupid question, so try not to laugh too hard at me. Can I make my lib in an interpreted language like Python, or does it need to be a compiled thing?
muntyan it needs to be real lib
muntyan but it's not hard
aquarius darn. :)
aquarius off to study my C, then ;)
muntyan gcc file.c -o mylib.so -shared
muntyan if you don't need portability and such
muntyan it won't work for ordinary people though :)
aquarius this is true.
aquarius It's another line of attack though :)

Sabayon does this by setting up another user and demanding root.