Screenshots -> AVI/SWF movie

Forum: Apps
Topic: Screenshots -> AVI/SWF movie
started by: liran

Posted by liran on July 20 2005,11:14

Hey everyone,

I was wondering if someone had experienced this before-
I want to create visual movies/guides in DSL and I'm looking
for some screen capturing program that could save it all
to avi/mpg/swf or whatever format.

I was on freshmeat and found xrec and vidcap or something like that but they both require extra packages which usually result in around ~80mb install of other libs/packs

Is there some tool designed for that for DSL?
or rather a light-weight similar tool...

Thanks,
Lir

Posted by mikshaw on July 20 2005,14:27

can't say if this works in DSL, but here's a way to convert a series of images into a swf
< http://www.quiss.org/swftools/ >

Posted by liran on July 20 2005,14:36

well the problem being not to convert the images to swf or some other movie format but rather to actually accomplish a screen capture, which does it repeatedly and makes a movie out of it.

(should i just go with runing a loop of xwd or something?)

Posted by Max on July 20 2005,14:38

The Impress program (like PowerPoint) of Open Office can also export directly to swf. This would make it easy to annotate any screen shots and you could probably even add in an audio narration track.

Posted by liran on July 21 2005,17:21

i just want to know how do i take a simple screenshot of the screen of the entire screen with dsl.
like to do xwd -out myscreen.xwd
but i cant use it cause its waiting for a mouse-click and i want to put it in a loop to create
hundreds of images which i can later use to create a movie stream.

any ideas?
thanks

Posted by mikshaw on July 22 2005,14:43

try ImageMagick + a small shell script:

#!/bin/bash
TOTAL=20
COUNT=0
while [ $COUNT -lt $TOTAL ]; do
COUNT=$(($COUNT+1))
import -window root filename${COUNT}.png
sleep 3
done

This will take a snapshot every 3 seconds, for a total of 20 snapshots.
You could also include some editing commands in there, say if you want to resize or frame the images as they are created. Check imagemagick.org for more info.

The script could also probably be extended to automatically join the images into an animation, but i don't know if ImageMagick can do that or if you'd need additional software, such as transcode.