XVidCap
Encyclopedia
XVidCap is free software used for recording a screencast
Screencast
A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture, often containing audio narration. The term screencast compares with the related term screenshot; whereas screenshot is a picture of a computer screen, a screencast is essentially a movie of the...

 or digital recording of an X Window System
X Window System
The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...

 screen output with an audio narration. Screen capture tools are very handy for developers to document software and installation procedures. They can also be used by educators to help prepare tutorials for other software.

XVidCap is intended to be a standards-based, open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 alternative to commercial software such as Lotus ScreenCam for UNIX platforms and is similar to Camtasia
Camtasia Studio
Camtasia Studio and Camtasia for Mac are screen video capture software, published by TechSmith. The user defines the area of the screen or the window that is to be captured or the whole screen can be recorded instead. This is set before the recording begins...

 for Microsoft windows.

Features

XVidCap works using an on-line encoding facility with the FFmpeg
FFmpeg
FFmpeg is a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. The most notable parts of FFmpeg are libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library, and the ffmpeg command line...

 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.

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.

See also

  • Screencast
    Screencast
    A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture, often containing audio narration. The term screencast compares with the related term screenshot; whereas screenshot is a picture of a computer screen, a screencast is essentially a movie of the...

  • List of screencasting software
  • Comparison of screencasting software
    Comparison of screencasting software
    A comparison of notable screencasting software programs, that are used to record activities on the computer screen, mouse movement, and often includes live audio for later playback. Screencasting is an asynchronous communication technology...


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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