Xvidcap
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Xvidcap | |
 working software |
|
| Developer: | Karl Beckers |
|---|---|
| Latest release: | 1.1.4 / 30 October 2006 |
| OS: | BSD, Linux, UNIX |
| Use: | Screencast |
| License: | GPL |
| Website: | xvidcap.sourceforge.net |
xvidcap is a free software used for recording a screencast or digital recording of an X Window System screen output with an audio narration. Screen capture tools are very handy for developers to document software and installation procedures. They can also used by Educators to help prepare tutorials for other software.
Xvidcap is intended to be a standards-based, open source alternative to commercial software such as Lotus ScreenCam for UNIX platforms and is similar to Camtasia for Microsoft windows.
[edit] Features
Xvidcap works using an on-line encoding facility with the FFmpeg libavcodec / libavformat. It can capture any movement on an X11 display either as single frames (like a number of JPEG images) or it can encode the captured frames to a video on-line. It can also grab and embed an audio recording provided users have an OSS compatible system and FFMPEG libraries with compiled audio capture support. Linux based systems such as Ubuntu are generally OSS compatible and Solaris systems are generally not.
As the X11 display system doesn't support a generic way to determine the shape of the current mouse pointer, xvidcap can only capture the mouse movement to video by painting a dummy mouse pointer arrow at the current position in every frame. This is a limitation for applications that change the shape of the mouse pointer such as Gimp. Recent development versions offer capturing of the actual mouse pointer shapes through the Xfixes extension. Users running a current Xserver version will typically have that and thus be able to capture the mouse pointer in its actual shape.
[edit] History
Rasca Gmelch developed an early version that was able to capture to individual frames and save them in individual screenshot files. Whilst this approach requires considerable storage, these files could later be converted into a video with tools like transcode. As Rasca had no further time to maintain his code, the project and code was migrated to SourceForge by Karl Beckers where it is currently under development.
