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XVidCap - Video Capture for X
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Rasca, Berlin 1997-1999, Published under the GNU GPL
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extended by Karl, Frankfurt 2003
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Capture parts of your screen to single files for every frame or
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This program does not use a special hardware driver to access the
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video card. It just asks the X server about rectangular areas. This
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means you need a fast machine (>= 133 MHz) and a fast harddrive. Big
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frames (e.g. 384x288 = 1/2 PAL) at a high FPS rate are only possible
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with very very fast systems :-) but this program may also work on
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non-Linux systems.. try it.
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(verified on Lintel and Solaris/SPARC)
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* Different frame output formats: XWD, PPM, PNG, MNG and JPEG
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* Supported visuals: TrueColor 15 bpp, 16 bpp, 24 bpp, and 32 bpp,
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StaticGray/8 bpp (not all for all output formats)
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* PseudoColor/8bpp and TrueColor/8bpp only for some output formats
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* I don't know about DirectColor-visual, may be it works or not ..
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* GT: QuickTime support (RGB, JPEG and PNG) for TrueColor 15, 16, 24
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and 32bpp. (KHB: haven't been able to verify this)
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* Command line arguments could be set by X resources
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* Define frames per second (fps) which should be recorded
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* Frames could be saved compressed (.gz)
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* Set the maximum number of frames which should be captured
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* Set the maximum time in seconds to capture
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* Usage of the X shared memory extension if the X Server supports it
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* Step mode for capturing single frames
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* Captures mouse-pointer movement through pseudo-mouse-pointer
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Download Source Code, Binary (Linux glibc) and submit bug reports at:
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http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/xvidcap
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Additional programs / libraries
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For compressed XWD and PPM files you need the zlib, for PNG support
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you need zlib and the PNG library (0.96 or newer), for JPEG support
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you need the jpeg library. For viewing the recorded frames as
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animation the animate program of the ImageMagick package is very
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On-line video encoding uses ffmpeg, which is bundled for now due to
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color space conversion problems with 0.4.6. Watch out for dynamically
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linked versions with ffmpeg 0.next.
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Disabling backing store (-bs) at the Xserver gives better (faster)
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results on my system. Don't ask me why, I don't know about X server
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internals. Perhaps it's only imagination :-)
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I think the XWD output is the fastest one. If you use compression it
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will slow down the capturing. Compressed PPM seems to be faster as PNG
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with the same compression level and produces also smaler files.
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Codecs to be used for on-line encoding can be configured through
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$HOME/.xvidcap.scf and a parameter "codec". Supported values atm are
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"MPEG4", "MPEG1", or "MJPEG".
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Have a look at the man-page of xvidcap.
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karl, 24. October 2003 - 17:30
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This version no longer has an Xt UI!
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In return it has a load of other goodies, like:
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- documentation (need yelp to read it)
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- availability in English, German, Italian, Spanish
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- on-the-fly frame size reduction
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Now, the usual triple does what most users want, so it's just:
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- if you use compiz/beryl and use the capture area selector to single click and select a window to capture, don't click on the window title but the contents. Other window managers can handle it.
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- some codecs have certain requirements that they don't offer xvidcap a way of asking about it in advance. They may make xvidcap crash if configured to run with incompatible settings. Most notably it is DV which you cannot use with anything but a frame size of 720 x 576. So if you experience strange crashes, try running from command line and see if you get a message from libavcodec. Eventually, submit a bug. This is on the todo-list for xvidcap.next.
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I've taken to using indent with the following parameters: -bad -bap -bbo -nbc -bls -br -c40 -cd12 -cp12 -cs -hnl -kr -l80 -pcs -psl -saf -sai -saw -sob -ts4 -nut -sc
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Also, I've started using doxygen for documentation, though I don't use that comment style just EVERYWHERE.
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README
