Record more than 45 seconds of audio or video on the XO laptop

If you go into the Record activity on the XO laptop, you’ll find that you can only record a maximum of 45 seconds of video and audio. But since almost everything in this little green wonder is written in Python, it’s very easy to fix this. Open up the Terminal activity, cd to /usr/share/activities/Record.activity, and then use su to become root:

$ cd /usr/share/activities/Record.activity
$ su
#

Now, make a backup copy of constants.py:

# cp constants.py constants.py.orig

Open constants.py in vi, and look for these lines:

	DURATION_15 = 15
	DURATION_30 = 30
	DURATION_45 = 45

Add the following line right after the DURATION_45 line (you can put whatever you want instead of 240–this is the number of seconds):

	DURATION_240 =240

Next, find these lines:

	DURATIONS.append(DURATION_15)
	DURATIONS.append(DURATION_30)
	DURATIONS.append(DURATION_45)

And add the following line right after the DURATION_45 line:

	DURATIONS.append(DURATION_240)

Stop the Record activity if it’s already running, restart it, and you’ll now have an option to record for more than 45 seconds.