There have been a lot of challenges in shooting, editing, and uploading a video successfully to YouTube especially on Linux. This page contains some hints how to shoot a video and how to upload it.
Feel free to add/combine your experiences here.
YouTube accepts a lot of video formats. However, in many cases the contents of an accepted video is scrambled when viewing the uploaded video. Uploading has been most reliable when using AVI format with a well-known resolution.
Use XVidCap to capture a screencast from a selected area of your desktop in MPEG format.
If you prefer shooting mute screencasts and record a soundtrack separately, you can use any recording software for recording. A common option is gnome-sound-recorder.
Gstreamer can be used to add a soundtrack to a mute screencast. The following spell combines an MPEG video with an ogg vorbis soundtrack and produces an avi video.
gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location=my_video.mpeg ! \ decodebin ! videoscale ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=1280,height=720 ! ffmpegcolorspace ! queue ! xvidenc ! \ queue max-size-bytes=1000000 max-size-time=0 ! avimux name=mux \ filesrc location=my_audio.ogg ! oggdemux ! vorbisdec ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! lame ! \ queue max-size-bytes=1000000 max-size-time=0 ! mux. \ mux. ! queue max-size-bytes=1000000 ! filesink location=final_video.avi
Pitivi video editor looks promising for editing videos. However, it does not cope well with non-standard resolutions, formats, or framerates. And it's not known how to export a proper HD video from it.
Record-my-desktop. Any experiences?