xvidcap releases completely overhauled 1.1.4 preview 3 (SourceForge) [LWN.net]

Version 1.1.4 preview 3 of xvidcap is available. "xvidcap is a screen capture enabling you to capture videos off your X-Window desktop for illustration or documentation purposes. It is intended to be a standards-based alternative to tools like Lotus ScreenCam. This is a major refactoring of the project to increase ease-of-use and ease-of-installation. The project has dropped a number of peripheral features to put more speed into the central functionality."

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xvidcap releases completely overhauled 1.1.4 preview 3 (SourceForge)

Posted Jul 14, 2006 12:40 UTC (Fri) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

When I last used xvidcap, the results were acceptable, but certainly less than ideal, with various artifacting and imprecision which can almost certainly be attributed to the XviD encoding used. While it is possible for higher quality settings to be used, or possibly even more fancy codecs, I am curious if anyone has consdered looking into creating a codec aimed at capturing high-contrast, high-detail, largely static images such as computer desktops.

For example, as I type this here, only two very small parts of my screen are being updated. Character by character, glyphs are appearing in this textarea (and the cursor is dancing along ahead of them), and a download of files is progressing in a terminal powered by wget, again updating a few characters, with a periodic vertical scroll of a region. Just doing some sort of run length encoding across the pixels over time would probably beat XviD for this purpose, and certainly should be less CPU intensive.

Maybe I should try some experimentation, though I expect my results will be terrible as graphic programming is hardly my forte.

xvidcap releases completely overhauled 1.1.4 preview 3 (SourceForge)

Posted Jul 18, 2006 2:39 UTC (Tue) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link]

I am curious if anyone has consdered looking into creating a codec aimed at capturing high-contrast, high-detail, largely static images such as computer desktops.

MNG (with delta-images) has been used in this way (e.g., closed-source Gserver, IIRC), and apparently it's pretty efficient at it. But it's also a very complex spec, and even using libmng, one would really prefer some sort of delta-of-mostly-static-graphic-images wrapper to simplify the programming. (libmng will create MNGs, but you have to tell it explicitly which chunks to write and what to put in each one. It's really designed mostly for reading and playing back MNG streams, not for encoding them.)

Greg