1
XVidCap - Video Capture for X
4
Rasca, Berlin 1997-1999, Published under the GNU GPL
5
extended by Karl, Frankfurt 2003
7
Capture parts of your screen to single files for every frame or
10
This program does not use a special hardware driver to access the
11
video card. It just asks the X server about rectangular areas. This
12
means you need a fast machine (>= 133 MHz) and a fast harddrive. Big
13
frames (e.g. 384x288 = 1/2 PAL) at a high FPS rate are only possible
14
with very very fast systems :-) but this program may also work on
15
non-Linux systems.. try it.
16
(verified on Lintel and Solaris/SPARC)
20
* Different frame output formats: XWD, PPM, PNG, MNG and JPEG
21
* Supported visuals: TrueColor 15 bpp, 16 bpp, 24 bpp, and 32 bpp,
22
StaticGray/8 bpp (not all for all output formats)
23
* PseudoColor/8bpp and TrueColor/8bpp only for some output formats
24
* I don't know about DirectColor-visual, may be it works or not ..
25
* GT: QuickTime support (RGB, JPEG and PNG) for TrueColor 15, 16, 24
26
and 32bpp. (KHB: haven't been able to verify this)
27
* Command line arguments could be set by X resources
28
* Define frames per second (fps) which should be recorded
29
* Frames could be saved compressed (.gz)
30
* Set the maximum number of frames which should be captured
31
* Set the maximum time in seconds to capture
32
* Usage of the X shared memory extension if the X Server supports it
33
* Step mode for capturing single frames
34
* Captures mouse-pointer movement through pseudo-mouse-pointer
36
Download Source Code, Binary (Linux glibc) and submit bug reports at:
38
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/xvidcap
40
Additional programs / libraries
42
For compressed XWD and PPM files you need the zlib, for PNG support
43
you need zlib and the PNG library (0.96 or newer), for JPEG support
44
you need the jpeg library. For viewing the recorded frames as
45
animation the animate program of the ImageMagick package is very
47
On-line video encoding uses ffmpeg, which is bundled for now due to
48
color space conversion problems with 0.4.6. Watch out for dynamically
49
linked versions with ffmpeg 0.next.
61
Disabling backing store (-bs) at the Xserver gives better (faster)
62
results on my system. Don't ask me why, I don't know about X server
63
internals. Perhaps it's only imagination :-)
64
I think the XWD output is the fastest one. If you use compression it
65
will slow down the capturing. Compressed PPM seems to be faster as PNG
66
with the same compression level and produces also smaler files.
67
Codecs to be used for on-line encoding can be configured through
68
$HOME/.xvidcap.scf and a parameter "codec". Supported values atm are
69
"MPEG4", "MPEG1", or "MJPEG".
73
Have a look at the man-page of xvidcap.
75
karl, 24. October 2003 - 17:30