wrote:
SNIP
I use FFMPEG.
You don't want to use FFMPEG :-)
Command line invocation.

Hi Paul,

Because you said, "I use FFMPEG", I will give that
a try. I do not mind "Command line invocation".

Thanks again, John


Hi Paul,

You are CORRECT, "You don't want to use FFMPEG".

I thought you launch this "ap" (not an "ap"), via "Run" (Command Prompt)
with a "command tail".

John


It's not that bad.

To shoot video at one frame per second, when timing
software completion, I use this as a command. This
places screenshots in the current working directory.
I open the folder of JPG files with Avidemux 2.5,
and click the play button to see my "movie" or output
to another video format (if necessary). Doing it this
way, I can do demos of stuff, and just stop for a second,
allow FFMPEG to catch a screenshot, then select individual
frames later to make documentation. I could, say,
select a00103.jpg, a00205.jpg and a10000.jpg and upload
them to PostImg.

C:\FFMPEG\bin\ffmpeg -framerate 1 -f gdigrab -i desktop -f image2 -q:v 1 -c:v mjpeg a%05d.jpg

You can timestamp the video. The movie here can
be played with "ffplay" (if you're lucky). I've played
with "raw" capture mode just for fun - but it's not
compatible with anything else really.

C:\FFMPEG\bin\ffmpeg -framerate 60 -f gdigrab -i desktop
-vf drawtext=fontfile=arial.ttf:fontsize=14:fontcolor= :x=08:y=466:text=%{p ts}..%{localtime}
-vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt bgr24 F:\out.mov

For sound and video, you first "discover" the name of the
sound device.

ffmpeg -list_devices true -f dshow -i dummy # Name of sound first...
ffmpeg -f dshow -list_options true -i audio="SoundMAX HD Audio" # Number of channels etc

With the name of the sound, now I can capture a portion of
my screen in real time. I might use this for Youtube Flash,
once HW Acceleration in Flash is turned off.

ffmpeg -offset_x 0 -offset_y 480 -video_size 720x480 -framerate 60
-f gdigrab -i desktop
-f dshow -sample_rate 44100 -i audio="SoundMAX HD Audio"
-q:v 1 -vcodec mjpeg -acodec pcm_s16le out.avi

The first row is pretty obvious. Not stating offset and dimensions
causes the whole screen to be captured.

The second line states the video source.

The third line states the raw sound source.

The fourth line specified "high quality", as a Q of 1 is no-compression
and a Q of 32 is high-compression-fuzzy. Q:V means Quality of Video.

The MJPEG codec is multithreaded. If you have a four core processor,
FFMPEG will work on compressing four frames at a time. I don't think
there is any temporal compression, so a good disk is needed for the
storage rate.

The audio codec is pretty standard for windows, with the LE standing
for "little Endian".

The choice of AVI is OK, as I suspect FFMPEG has AVI2 support and
once the file is past 4GB in size, it will be using AVI2 features.

For software, I use:

https://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/

Click 3.4.2
Click Windows 32 bit (for WinXP)
Click Static
Hold mouse over the Blue bar and verify the filename.
Click Blue bar and start download.

I unpack mine and keep it in C:\FFMPEG for no particular reason.

That's a very basic set of commands for screen capture.

*******

Making a two-pass DVD segment, looks like this. The aspect
ratio choice might have been because I was using WinTV
video tape capture or something. These numbers wouldn't
be "official" DVD, but they're headed in that direction.
And this is video format conversion, not screen capture.
It's possible the "target" command is including other
details about MPEG2 or whatever. The first pass outputs
a file (not named there) which carries "rate" info which
is used during the second pass. The quality is adjusted
down on the second pass, so the stated "buffer" doesn't overflow.

ffmpeg -i G:\WORK\Star_Wars_New_Hope_20113.avi -target ntsc-dvd
-aspect 4:3 -g 12 -b:v 3900k -maxrate 8000000 -minrate 0
-bufsize 1835008 -pass 1 -y NUL

ffmpeg -i G:\WORK\Star_Wars_New_Hope_20113.avi -target ntsc-dvd
-aspect 4:3 -g 12 -b:v 3900k -maxrate 8000000 -minrate 0
-bufsize 1835008 -pass 2 F:\output.vob

FFMPEG is the Swiss army knife of video.

"Even if you don't get any results, you'll have a hobby."

Paul