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
- Different frame output formats: XWD, PPM, PNG,
MNG and JPEG
- Supported visuals: TrueColor 15 bpp, 16 bpp, 24 bpp, and 32 bpp, StaticGray/8 bpp
- PseudoColor/8bpp and TrueColor/8bpp only for some output formats
- I don't know about DirectColor-visual, may be it works or not ..
- GT: QuickTime support (RGB, JPEG and PNG)
for TrueColor 15, 16, 24 and 32bpp.
- Command line arguments could be set by X resources
- Define frames per second (fps) which should be recorded
- Frames could be saved compressed (.gz)
- Set the maximum number of frames which should be captured
- Set the maximum time in seconds to capture
- Usage of the X shared memory extension if the X Server supports it
- Step mode for capturing single frames
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
- Create a Makefile, with
xmkmf -a
or use the
included setup.tcl-tool (which in
turn runs the 'configure' script)
- Compile the source code with
make
or via the
setup.tcl-tool
- Install the program with
make install
or use
setup.tcl
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