XVidCap - Video Capture for X
Version 1.0.9

© Rasca, Berlin 1997-1999, Published under the GNU GPL

Capture parts of your screen to single files for every frame. This could be used as input for e.g. a MPEG encoder. I use this package to grab frames of my running XtTV program, which uses the bttv video/TV card driver for bt848-based cards.

This program does not use a special hardware driver to access the video card. It just asks the X server about rectangular areas. This means you need a fast machine (>= 133 MHz) and a fast harddrive. Big frames (e.g. 384x288 = 1/2 PAL) at a high FPS rate are only possible with very very fast systems :-) but this program may also work on non-Linux systems.. try it.

Warning: this is an unstable beta release! Bug reports would be nice..

Features

Download Source Code, Binary (Linux glibc) and Screen Dump

ftp://ftp.komm.hdk-berlin.de/pub/linux/X11/xvidcap-1.0.9.tar.gz
http://home.pages.de/~rasca/xvidcap/dump.png
http://home.pages.de/~rasca/xvidcap/xvidcap.gz (ldd output)

Additional programs / libraries

For compressed XWD and PPM files you need the zlib, for PNG support you need zlib and the PNG library (0.96 or newer), for JPEG support you need the jpeg library. For viewing the recorded frames as animation the animate program of the ImageMagick package is very handy.

Installation

Todo

Support for other visuals/bit depths. Disable Shm if client and server are not running on the same host. Support for saving the settings in the options dialog window and fixes in Field.c. Support for Video4Linux, sound support.

Tips and hints

Disabling backing store (-bs) at the Xserver gives better (faster) results on my system. Don't ask me why, I don't know about X server internals. Perhaps it's only imagination :-)
I think the XWD output is the fastest one. If you use compression it will slow down the capturing. Compressed PPM seems to be faster as PNG with the same compression level and produces also smaler files.

A patch for xanim 27070 is included to make xanim happy to accept big movies created with xvidcap.

Documentation

Have a look at the man-page of xvidcap.

Resources

ImageMagick, this package contains the program 'animate'
XAnim, X11 animation program to play QT files
Berkeley's, MPEG2 encoder and decoder
zLib, the well know compression library
PNG, portable network graphics
bttv, a Linux driver for Bt848 based frame grabbers
JPEG, a free JPEG library

Related Projects

XMixer
XtTV
w3Cam

It's GnuTime


rasca, 05. Feb 1999 - 17:35