Recording desktop actions

This was talked about some time ago, but I've forgotten what was said.

In OS X, the Quick Time player is able to record your mouse and desktop
movements. Very simple operation.

The Windows version doe not. :-(

I need to do the same thing for Windows. I'm just recording mouse
movements, clicking on buttons, etc. for presentations on how to
actually use the computer rather than floundering around until something
works.

Wouldn't mind if it autoloaded during bootup, may something that can be
enabled and disabled in msconfig. Also, invoked with a keyboard shortcut.

Suggestions?


--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.8.5
Firefox 42.0
Thunderbird 38.0.1
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

On 20/12/15 01:40, Ken Springer wrote:


I need to do the same thing for Windows. I'm just recording mouse
movements, clicking on buttons, etc. for presentations on how to
actually use the computer rather than floundering around until
something works.

Wouldn't mind if it autoloaded during bootup, may something that can
be enabled and disabled in msconfig. Also, invoked with a keyboard
shortcut.

Suggestions?



Ken, it is called screen recording and just for you, one of our regular
octogenarians, I will make a suggestions for you for this Christmas. My
suggestion is to use this softwa

http://screencast-o-matic.com/screen_recorder

You can read all about it at this link:

http://screencast-o-matic.com/home

Hope this is going to help you before you die as most octogenarians die
for reasons we can't discuss here.

Lord Janner dies, aged 87, after long illness
cid
Jimmy Hill: Former Match of the Day presenter dies aged 87
cid
Conductor Kurt Masur dies at 88 cid
Merry Christmas.

On 20/12/15 01:40, Ken Springer wrote:


I need to do the same thing for Windows. I'm just recording mouse
movements, clicking on buttons, etc. for presentations on how to
actually use the computer rather than floundering around until
something works.

Wouldn't mind if it autoloaded during bootup, may something that can
be enabled and disabled in msconfig. Also, invoked with a keyboard
shortcut.

Suggestions?


Ken, it is called screen recording and just for you, one of our regular
octogenarians, I will make a suggestions for you for this Christmas. My
suggestion is to use this softwa

http://screencast-o-matic.com/screen_recorder

You can read all about it at this link:

http://screencast-o-matic.com/home

Hope this is going to help you before you die as most octogenarians die
for reasons we can't discuss here.

Lord Janner dies, aged 87, after long illness
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-35142675

Jimmy Hill: Former Match of the Day presenter dies aged 87
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/35141430

Conductor Kurt Masur dies at 88
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-35142738

Merry Christmas.

On 20/12/15 01:40, Ken Springer wrote:


I need to do the same thing for Windows. I'm just recording mouse
movements, clicking on buttons, etc. for presentations on how to
actually use the computer rather than floundering around until
something works.

Suggestions?



Ken, it is called screen recording and just for you, one of our regular
octogenarians, I will make a suggestions for you for this Christmas. My
suggestion is to use this softwa

http://screencast-o-matic.com/screen_recorder

You can read all about it at this link:

http://screencast-o-matic.com/home

Hope this is going to help you before you die as most octogenarians die
for reasons we can't discuss here.

Lord Janner dies, aged 87, after long illness
cid
Jimmy Hill: Former Match of the Day presenter dies aged 87
cid
Conductor Kurt Masur dies at 88 cid
Merry Christmas.

Ken Springer wrote:
This was talked about some time ago, but I've forgotten what was said.

In OS X, the Quick Time player is able to record your mouse and desktop
movements. Very simple operation.

The Windows version doe not. :-(

I need to do the same thing for Windows. I'm just recording mouse
movements, clicking on buttons, etc. for presentations on how to
actually use the computer rather than floundering around until something
works.

Wouldn't mind if it autoloaded during bootup, may something that can be
enabled and disabled in msconfig. Also, invoked with a keyboard shortcut.

Suggestions?

For some of the titles here, you'll want to run them
through Wikipedia for Adware warnings. Wikipedia, for
example, has a section on CamStudio, including the
Adware that was added to it at some point.

http://www.videohelp.com/software/se...screen-capture

OK, an example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camstudio

Now, is CamStudio open source ? Yes, sorta. I spent
a week trying to build my own Visual Studio project
file to compile it, only to discover there is a file
missing from the source. So you cannot compile
your own EXE from source.

"Malicious software

In January 2014, the binary on the webpage www.camstudio.org was
reported to be infected with the trojan, Artemis!0FEA2B12900D
...
As of beginning of 2015 CamStudio installation is still distributing
a malicious software, though the prior uninfected installers can be
obtained from SourceForge. The installer appears to use the infamous
SourceForge DevShare program, which is also responsible for bundling
adware with nmap, GIMP, and FileZilla."

CamStudio also happens to have a 4GB output file limit,
implying it doesn't know how to generate AVI2 (OpenDML)
files. And is limited to the original AVI. This is fine
if you select a high compression codec - if you do that,
there will be some color fringing on the capture. If you
were to use a codec that doesn't compress, you could
run out of storage space pretty quickly.

On my current machine, the "desired FPS" was set to 200FPS
in the interface. But if you examine the movie generated
later, it captures at 7FPS. The rest of the frames are
economically copied by the tool, to fill out the movie
(about 30 identical frames in a row just copied).

A couple Google developers worked on it, but they
were interested in peripheral issues. I think one
person worked on multi-monitor support, so it could
capture a larger desktop area.

I think the implementation has some nice features,
but there are also glaring limitations.

*******

I use ffmpeg "GDIGRAB" filter, but this has issues too.
I prefer this method because of the command line interface
and ability to try goofy things. For example, I was
trying to do uncompressed capture, just to see what
kind of framerate could be sustained. Although that
worked, the capture jitter was terrible. So the more you
push that tool, the worse the extremes of capture jitter
become.

You will find a lot of tools are asynchronous to the screen,
and don't take advantage of the hardware equivalent of VSYNC.
And with the jitter issue, you may find downstream quality
issues when working with your capture in an editor.

Some tools "fake" the cursor. They use separate calls to get
the cursor coordinates, then "add back" the mouse arrow as
a composite. I expect other tools that appear to be
properly capturing your screen, they could be cheating too.

*******

If you purchase a ~$100 video capture card and stuff it in a
second PC, you can do captures that way. The video cards in
the next tier up, do "passthru" capture, and have an input
HDMI and output HDMI port. This allows you to do what you
would have expected to do in the first place, which is
actually use the thing. In the case of the $100 cards
that do capture, but without passthru, on those you
put the device under test in "mirror" mode, and make
the machine produce two identical video outputs. One
feeds the capture card, one feeds the monitor. The cheap
capture cards are limited to 1080i60 instead of 1080p60
and they also don't have HDCP keys in them - if you send
a screen protected with HDCP to the capture card, you
get snow. And that would be what your Hollywood movie
playback would encourage, is the usage of HDCP.

A video capture card is synchronous, so if you play a 24FPS
Youtube video on your 60Hz LCD monitor, the video capture
card will record 60FPS, even if it is i60 and interleaved.
Instead of progressive.

None of these hardware capture cards are ready for primetime,
and they're more suited to people who like to tinker with stuff.
On a good product, you find just one capture codec works,
the card captures a black screen if the screen resolution
changes part way through the capture. And so on. Rough edges.
Promises of updates and fixes. The usual baloney. But to their
credit, the price is lower. At one time, a quality "screen
capture box" cost $2000 and was wimpy. Now, you can get
cards with a chip or two on them, which do the equivalent
of that $2000 box. Some of the cards have home-made
compressors (FPGA and custom design code), while some
others use commercial compressor chips.

*******

On the videohelp page, you'll notice the IceCream
capture program is listed. The download is pretty large,
but inside, it's the bloat of various open source
libraries that accounts for the size. Unfortunately,
I didn't have the guts to install it. It's very
difficult to determine what their business model
is. The web page makes it look free (and we all know
that serious developers don't do this stuff for nothing).
One web page hinted at a free and a Pro version, yet
I couldn't find a price or feature comparison anywhere.
The videohelp site claims that product is a "trial".
Which means it could stop working after a while.
The company headquarters is in Cyprus.

http://icecreamapps.com/download/scr...rder_setup.exe

When unpacked with WINE, this is what the file set looks like.
It uses Qt5 and LibAV, and one of the huge file components
handles localization (different languages for the interface).

Icecream Screen Recorder:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 10016768 Jul 2 09:23 avcodec-56.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 243200 Jul 2 09:24 avdevice-56.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 1330688 Jul 2 09:24 avfilter-5.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 1985536 Jul 2 09:24 avformat-56.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 637952 Jul 2 08:01 avutil-54.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 138240 Aug 8 2014 CrashRpt1403.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 8214 Oct 13 2013 crashrpt_lang.ini
-rw-rw-r-- 1 104960 Aug 8 2014 CrashRptProbe1403.dll
-rwxrwxr-x 1 945152 Aug 8 2014 CrashSender1403.exe
-rw-rw-r-- 1 1256080 Jul 16 2014 dbghelp.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 23507968 Jan 15 2014 icudt52.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 1798656 Jan 15 2014 icuin52.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 1304064 Jan 15 2014 icuuc52.dll
drwxrwxr-x 2 4096 Dec 2 11:31 imageformats
-rw-rw-r-- 1 421200 Jun 10 2011 msvcp100.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 773968 Jun 10 2011 msvcr100.dll
drwxrwxr-x 2 4096 Dec 2 11:31 platforms
-rw-rw-r-- 1 4111872 Nov 16 2014 Qt5Core.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 4342272 May 15 2014 Qt5Gui.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 849408 May 15 2014 Qt5Network.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 4370944 May 15 2014 Qt5Widgets.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 190976 May 15 2014 Qt5WinExtras.dll
-rwxrwxr-x 1 116736 Jun 30 21:44 quickshot.exe
-rwxrwxr-x 1 1841152 Aug 20 09:02 recorder.exe
-rw-rw-r-- 1 256512 Jul 2 09:22 swresample-1.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 691712 Jul 2 08:01 swscale-3.dll
drwxrwxr-x 2 4096 Dec 2 11:31 translations
-rw-rw-r-- 1 25573 Dec 2 11:31 unins000.dat
-rwxrwxr-x 1 1559753 Dec 2 11:31 unins000.exe

Icecream Screen Recorder/imageformats:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 32256 May 15 2014 qdds.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 21504 May 15 2014 qgif.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 27648 May 15 2014 qicns.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 20992 May 15 2014 qico.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 381952 May 15 2014 qjp2.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 204800 May 15 2014 qjpeg.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 218112 May 15 2014 qmng.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 15872 May 15 2014 qsvg.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 15360 May 15 2014 qtga.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 307712 May 15 2014 qtiff.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 14848 May 15 2014 qwbmp.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 252928 May 15 2014 qwebp.dll

Icecream Screen Recorder/platforms:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 261336 Aug 13 14:47 promo.bmp
-rw-rw-r-- 1 24576 May 15 2014 qminimal.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 432640 May 15 2014 qoffscreen.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 875008 May 15 2014 qwindows.dll

Icecream Screen Recorder/translations:
....
-rw-rw-r-- 1 23362 Aug 7 12:49 lang_en.qm

I didn't see anything in the list that screams
"Adware", and the purpose of showing that
list, is to show how a screen capture program
needs a 35MB download. The CamStudio code
is quite a bit smaller.

Even "CrashRpt1403" is open source and goes by
that name on the web. So you can track that
one down too.

The Icecream developers still have to do some work, as
they have to command avcodec and friends to do
the capture. (This would be the same as doing it
with FFMPEG roughly.)

*******

You can do screen capture with VLC. But I don't
know what versions support this.

http://www.wikihow.com/Screen-Capture-to-File-Using-VLC

Paul

In message , Paul
writes:
Ken Springer wrote:
This was talked about some time ago, but I've forgotten what was said.
In OS X, the Quick Time player is able to record your mouse and
desktop movements. Very simple operation.
The Windows version doe not. :-(
I need to do the same thing for Windows. I'm just recording mouse
movements, clicking on buttons, etc. for presentations on how to
actually use the computer rather than floundering around until
something works.
Wouldn't mind if it autoloaded during bootup, may something that can
be enabled and disabled in msconfig. Also, invoked with a keyboard
shortcut.
Suggestions?

For some of the titles here, you'll want to run them
through Wikipedia for Adware warnings. Wikipedia, for
[_Very_ comprehensive answer snipped!]

Although Ken did say he was wanting it for presentations, so maybe
screen-capture videos _is_ the answer that suits him, at first I thought
he wanted to "record your mouse and desktop movements", to be able to
play them back (and have them actually do what they did when recorded).

I remember - can't remember if it was under Windows 3.1 or Windows 9x -
some functionality similar to that was available, I think under the name
macro recording, as part of the OS. I have the feeling it fell by the
wayside some while back, though I think there were at least for a little
while third-party options (maybe free, maybe not).

Is anything similar still there, hidden away perhaps? If not, any
suitable third-party? (I don't at the moment have a great need for such,
but Ken's question - or at least my interpretation of it - made me
wonder.)
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

once described by Eccentrica Golumbits as the best bang since the big one ...
(first series, fit the second)

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:


Although Ken did say he was wanting it for presentations, so maybe
screen-capture videos _is_ the answer that suits him, at first I thought
he wanted to "record your mouse and desktop movements", to be able to
play them back (and have them actually do what they did when recorded).

I remember - can't remember if it was under Windows 3.1 or Windows 9x -
some functionality similar to that was available, I think under the name
macro recording, as part of the OS. I have the feeling it fell by the
wayside some while back, though I think there were at least for a little
while third-party options (maybe free, maybe not).

Is anything similar still there, hidden away perhaps? If not, any
suitable third-party? (I don't at the moment have a great need for such,
but Ken's question - or at least my interpretation of it - made me wonder.)

You're probably thinking of "macro-recording",
where a tool records what you're doing, so it
can be played back later.

Photoshop, for example, had its own macro-recorder,
which I used to use with my scanner. If I scanned
a B&W document, and the noise characteristics of each
sheet of paper were predictable, I would record a
macro in Photoshop, and apply the same post-process
to each scanned sheet. It meant I could click a
button and go on walk-about for 2 minutes, until
the thing was finished and I could put the next
sheet of paper in the scanner. The whole process
was maddening. But I wasn't about to go nuts
and put an autofeeder on my scanner (it had an
optional accessory for that). I didn't scan enough
documents to make it worthwhile. Processing
a 50 page document, meant walking in circles
for 100 minutes, talking to yourself :-)

Paul

In message , Paul
writes:
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:

Although Ken did say he was wanting it for presentations, so maybe
screen-capture videos _is_ the answer that suits him, at first I
thought he wanted to "record your mouse and desktop movements", to be
able to play them back (and have them actually do what they did when
recorded).
I remember - can't remember if it was under Windows 3.1 or Windows
9x - some functionality similar to that was available, I think under
the name macro recording, as part of the OS. I have the feeling it
fell by the wayside some while back, though I think there were at
least for a little while third-party options (maybe free, maybe not).
Is anything similar still there, hidden away perhaps? If not, any
suitable third-party? (I don't at the moment have a great need for
such, but Ken's question - or at least my interpretation of it - made
me wonder.)

You're probably thinking of "macro-recording",

Yes, when I said "I think under the name macro recording", I probably
am ... (-:

where a tool records what you're doing, so it
can be played back later.

I'd forgotten that some tools have their own variations on the theme.
But I'm sure I remember seeing it as part of the OS, though I think it
might have been way back in the days of Windows 3.1 (or 3.11), or
possibly '9x.

I was wondering if it's still there, buried away (or a third-party
app.), though I can't think of many cases where I'd use it ATM.

Photoshop, for example, had its own macro-recorder,
which I used to use with my scanner. If I scanned
a B&W document, and the noise characteristics of each
sheet of paper were predictable, I would record a
macro in Photoshop, and apply the same post-process
to each scanned sheet. It meant I could click a
button and go on walk-about for 2 minutes, until
the thing was finished and I could put the next
sheet of paper in the scanner. The whole process
was maddening. But I wasn't about to go nuts
and put an autofeeder on my scanner (it had an
optional accessory for that). I didn't scan enough
documents to make it worthwhile. Processing
a 50 page document, meant walking in circles
for 100 minutes, talking to yourself :-)

In terms of just actions to be performed on images, IrfanView has quite
a versatile batch processing capability; I've not explored it in much
depth. (Obviously you'd need to scan the pages unmodified then set it on
them afterwards.)

Paul
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

"I'm not against women. Not often enough, anyway." - Groucho Marx

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:


In terms of just actions to be performed on images, IrfanView has quite
a versatile batch processing capability; I've not explored it in much
depth. (Obviously you'd need to scan the pages unmodified then set it on
them afterwards.)

Photoshop used to drive my scanner. The scanner came with
a Photoshop plugin (it was one of the best features of
the whole scanner in fact). So you could place
a sheet of paper on the scanner, have your macro loaded,
and it would do the whole process for you. But since the
time to process the page was short, you really couldn't
do anything else except (slowly) feed sheets of paper,
while you cursed and swore and walked in circles :-)
I really really needed an autofeeder.

So the software solution was all-in-one. The one program
did everything for you. If I was using IrfanView,
that would be a separate step later (which I suppose
wouldn't be all that bad).

The problem with Photoshop, was the undo buffer and
scratch disk idea. Which would take eons for the
simplest of workflows. At least half of your
time was wasted on the creaky workflow within
Photoshop. At the time, I wasn't about to run
out and build a RAID array for the scratch
disk for this.

The whole thing "just called for more money".
I'm sure you've run into projects where
it says "shovel more money into this hole
for better results". And the hole is
infinitely deep.

Paul

On Sun, 20 Dec 2015 01:59:02 -0500, Paul wrote:
"Malicious software

In January 2014, the binary on the webpage www.camstudio.org was
reported to be infected with the trojan, Artemis!0FEA2B12900D
...
As of beginning of 2015 CamStudio installation is still distributing
a malicious software, though the prior uninfected installers can be
obtained from SourceForge.

Howtogeek reports that, since somebody bought Sourceforge, it is now
bundling foistware into many downloads, like Downloads.com. They
recommend against using either one.



--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://BrownMath.com/
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
Shikata ga nai...

On 12/20/15 2:18 AM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Paul
writes:
Ken Springer wrote:
This was talked about some time ago, but I've forgotten what was said.
In OS X, the Quick Time player is able to record your mouse and
desktop movements. Very simple operation.
The Windows version doe not. :-(
I need to do the same thing for Windows. I'm just recording mouse
movements, clicking on buttons, etc. for presentations on how to
actually use the computer rather than floundering around until
something works.
Wouldn't mind if it autoloaded during bootup, may something that can
be enabled and disabled in msconfig. Also, invoked with a keyboard
shortcut.
Suggestions?

For some of the titles here, you'll want to run them
through Wikipedia for Adware warnings. Wikipedia, for
[_Very_ comprehensive answer snipped!]

Although Ken did say he was wanting it for presentations, so maybe
screen-capture videos _is_ the answer that suits him, at first I thought
he wanted to "record your mouse and desktop movements", to be able to
play them back (and have them actually do what they did when recorded).

Screen capture videos is exactly what I'm after. Not a macro recorder.

I remember - can't remember if it was under Windows 3.1 or Windows 9x -
some functionality similar to that was available, I think under the name
macro recording, as part of the OS. I have the feeling it fell by the
wayside some while back, though I think there were at least for a little
while third-party options (maybe free, maybe not).

It was in both, dropped for W98. Although it was possible to simply
copy the correct files from W95 to W98 and it would work.

Is anything similar still there, hidden away perhaps? If not, any
suitable third-party? (I don't at the moment have a great need for such,
but Ken's question - or at least my interpretation of it - made me
wonder.)

Nothing hidden that I know of, other than one built into software like
Word, that only work s in Word, of course. There are some macro
recorders out there but I've not used any of them.




--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.8.5
Firefox 42.0
Thunderbird 38.0.1
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"