News:

• 30. Oct. 2006 - 1.1.4 released
• 9. Jan. 2004 - Revamped Homepage to align with FAQ look and feel
• 8. Jan. 2004 - Instructional videos are finally available ... see below
• 2. Jan. 2004 - An FAQ is available here

Introduction:

This site is about xvidcap, a small tool to capture things going on on an X-Windows display to either individual frames or an MPEG video. On Windows machines there are commercial tools like Lotus ScreenCam or Camtasia which do a very good job esp. for the purpose I was needing such a tool for: Software documentation, esp. installation procedures and such.

On UNIX machines I have searched for a comparable tool for a long time with little luck. Some day, I came across a program written by Rasca Gmelch which went a good way, just not quite there. It was able to capture to individual frames and save them in indivdual screenshots (which can be converted into a video with tools like transcode.)

This approach for me required more storage than I had available, so I added an on-line encoding facility using FFMPEG's libavcodec/libavformat. And since Rasca no longer has the time to maintain his code, I took over and the code to sourceforge.

Today, I suppose xvidcap does its basic job, though I find bugs and possible improvements every day. If you are a developer, appreciate a tool like xvidcap, and want to help improve it, contact me at the sourceforge site.

Cheers,

Karl.

xvidcap live:

Click on the image above to enlarge the screenshot.
Two instructional videos, about 9 MB each are available here:
Video 1 | Video 2

Links:

For more information have a look here:
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/xvidcap/