The process of recording screencasts can not be performed on a Raspberry Pi and must instead be performed on a powerful computer as the video encoding slows the Pi to much for fluent screencasts.

For screencasts you want a browser session that is fresh as-installed.

The command below sets the language to be english and uses a newly generated browser profile.

$ LANG= firefox --new-instance --profile $(mktemp -d)

The command below starts recording the screen with the correct size for screencasts and shows it in a new window.

Adjust the window you want to film to fit.

Adjust the +2,28 to catch another part of the screen.

$ ffplay -video_size 750x480 -framerate 30 -f x11grab -i :0.0+2,28

The command below will record the screen into the file screencast.mp4. Hit Ctrl+C when you are done.

$ ffmpeg -video_size 750x480 -framerate 30 -f x11grab -i :0.0+2,28 -an -vcodec libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -profile:v baseline -level 3 screencast.mp4

The command takes a screenshot 16.1 seconds into screencast.mp4 and saves it as still_image.png.

$ ffmpeg -ss 16.1 -i screencast.mp4 -vframes 1 still_image.png