XVidCap - Video Capture for X
Version 1.0.19

  Rasca, Berlin 1997-1999, Published under the GNU GPL
  extended by Karl, Frankfurt 2003

   Capture parts of your screen to single files for every frame or 
   to an mpeg stream.
   
   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.
   (verified on Lintel and Solaris/SPARC)
   
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 (not all for all output formats)
     * 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. (KHB: haven't been able to verify this)
     * 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
     * Captures mouse-pointer movement through pseudo-mouse-pointer
       
Download Source Code, Binary (Linux glibc) and submit bug reports at:

   http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/xvidcap

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.
   On-line video encoding uses ffmpeg, which is bundled for now due to
   color space conversion problems with 0.4.6. Watch out for dynamically
   linked versions with ffmpeg 0.next.
   
Installation

   ref. INSTALL
       
Todo

   ref. TODO
   
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.
   Codecs to be used for on-line encoding can be configured through 
   $HOME/.xvidcap.scf and a parameter "codec". Supported values atm are
   "MPEG4", "MPEG1", or "MJPEG".
   
Documentation

   Have a look at the man-page of xvidcap.
   
   karl, 24. October 2003 - 17:30
