Screencasting is the process of recording screencast - a video stream of picture from the screen (desktop, application or a single window). It allows to see how another person works through the eyes of this person. Tutorials, announcements, conference talks - many things benefit from a quality made screencast.
In Python, Blender community uses screencasts a lot and they even made Python helper to aid the process of capturing screen with FFMPEG on Linux.
Helpful tools for recording and processing screencasts:
In Python
recordscreen.py - video and audio capture for Linux with ffmpeg by Nathan Vegdahl, MIT
- `python recordscreen.py -n -w --vcodec vp8 output.webm' - select window to capture, turn off sound, record into WebM
key-mon - keyboard status monitor (Linux, Apache 2.0)
Other
LICEcap - GPL, non-Python tool for Mac OS and Windows that produces screencasting GIFs