pAVrecord Video/webcam recorder (mpeg4, Theora, x264)

Audio editors, music players, video players, burning software, etc.
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mcewanw
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testing latest pAVrecord version 9.0.5 prior to releasing

#61 Post by mcewanw »

Pelo wrote: youtube is 852x480.
...
It will be impossible to get under 5MB per minute
Hi Pelo

Quick test low quality 15 second screencast on Precise 5.7.1 using this to be released pAVrecord 9.0.5 with screencast framerate fix:

Duration 15 seconds
size: 852x480
video encoder: x264
video bitrate: 120 kbps
screencast framerate: 10fps
audio encoder: mp3
cbr 32k audio bitrate mono
Final file size: 210 kBytes (so would be 840 kB per minute for this reasonably low quality, low video bitrate, example - but still usable at this quality I feel).

Just remove the dummy .tar from the attached file before playing it.

I'll be uploading this newest pAVrecord version once testing is complete sometimes tomorrow.

Note: I've included a button to bring up xwininfo with this new version so easy to find window coordinates manually with that. Could also start up say an rxvt window, size that to the precise area you want to capture and then use xwininfo to note the coordinates and offsets of that area prior to closing the rxvt and then capturing that selected screen area. Certainly not an automatic method, since the user still has to manually enter the discovered values, but I find it works okay in practice.

William
github mcewanw

mcewanw
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New version pAVrecord (9.0.5) uploaded

#62 Post by mcewanw »

New version pAVrecord (9.0.5) uploaded to first post of this thread.

NOTE WELL: Please remember to delete your old $HOME/.pavrecord config directory before installing this.

Changes 9.0.5:

# (YMD)2014/08/15:
Improved screencast handling including button for xwininfo and option to show capture area during capture.
Also fixed x11grab framerate entry.
Significantly improved video encoding functionality:
Added video bitrate entry box.
pAVrecord previously only provided constant bit rate video encoding mode but this latest version adds variable bit rate video encoding mode capability in addition to the default cbr mode (uses -qscale vbr option for bitrate < 32).
Some mods to the apps help text.

I suggest trying VideoBitrate value 512 kbps, which is the default if the entry box is left blank. That provides fairly good quality for most encoders.
For highest quality screencasts along with small resultant filesize, I suggest selecting x264 encoder. Even VideoBitrates as low as 128 (in kbps), using scast framerate of 10 fps, seemed to give reasonable results and small filesize. Once you have set the screencast parameters you wish to use, I recommend pressing the button that returns to "Small GUI", prior to starting the actual screencast capture.

Note well that for a given video bit rate you will get higher quality encoding if you reduce the frame rate. In other words, for a given video bit rate you can trade frame rate for quality whilst keeping the same recorded video filesize.


If you want variable bit rate video mode instead of the default constant bit rate video mode, enter a value less than 32 into the VariableBitrate box. pAVrecord then automatically uses vbr and the VariableBitrate value is used as the quality setting (using ffmpeg -qscale internally). A medium quality value of 5 works quite well with most codecs. 10 provides highest quality for Theora encoder (different encoders respond differently to qscale values between 1 and 31; with some encoders, quality goes down for larger qscale value, for some it goes up - you need to experiment...).

In default cbr video mode, for higher quality (but double file size), you could enter a VideoBitrate of 1024 kbps instead of 512 kbps, or use whatever value you wish (lowest provided cbr mode is 32 kbps, which gives very low quality of course).
-----
github mcewanw

Pelo

pAVrecord 9.0.5 ( test aimed to frenchies)

#63 Post by Pelo »

PAVrecord do the job. Needs now some advertising :D
Drec is a fullscreen alternative
Attachments
TheRaby2011.jpg
(45.92 KiB) Downloaded 489 times
Last edited by Pelo on Sat 04 Oct 2014, 04:19, edited 11 times in total.

Pelo

nice ! perfect (quality x264 15fps ) i don't need more

#64 Post by Pelo »

nice ! perfect (quality x264 15fps ) i don't need more. I ran the simplest, i come back. But the video does not alter the screen.
VLC was used (No choice with Pupjibaro, VLC is alone...)
vbr : variable bit rate :
Dans un flux vidéo, par exemple, plus de données seront prélevées par unité de temps pour une scène complexe que pour une image plus simple et figée. Il en sera de même pour les sons.
Official recipe, the best choice : test scheduled after dinner....
Duration 15 seconds
size: 852x480
video encoder: x264
video bitrate: 30 kbps
screencast framerate: 10fps
audio encoder: mp3
cbr 16k audio bitrate mono
Gracias y Merci, Thank you.
xwininfo give x,y top left corner
youtube here click !

PAVrecord do the job. Needs now some advertising Very Happy
Attachments
xwinfo.jpg
click on a window to get position on scree (xwininfo in terminal)
(24.17 KiB) Downloaded 399 times
Last edited by Pelo on Sat 14 Mar 2015, 02:33, edited 6 times in total.

Pelo

Come back here, William, Vokoscreen was a dead topic of mine

#65 Post by Pelo »

Come back here, William, Vokoscreen was a dead topic of mine. As Vokoscreen is known better on the web than PAVrecord, it was for pulling future customers to your Puppy special application !
I am still typing in WOLX 2014, a french derivative of Wary. Tests on this distro are ok, consider that p.AVrecord will run on WARY and Racy.

About spanish hand, VLC needs FFMPEG stuff to run pAVrecord, VLC Version ... don't remember right now. It was Puppy es Night LXDE RC3, a very nice spanish distro ... With only VLC as media-player.

Screencasting is my interest, right. later i will certainly use my video camera, but right now, i translate tutorials from english and it's boring. It's much more fun to do it via videos and audio comments :D
Mais mes leaders du forum francophone ne veulent pas entendre parler de YouTube !
Attachments
pAVrecord905.jpg
10 fps is the cheaper, and enough. But 30 for video is too low, acceptable however, 120 or 150framerate would be an useful investment, even for a scottish !
(70.88 KiB) Downloaded 620 times
Last edited by Pelo on Thu 21 Aug 2014, 08:05, edited 1 time in total.

mcewanw
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#66 Post by mcewanw »

I still say that improving screencast capability (e.g. using mouse to specify screencast region of interest) should proceed as an addon module for pavrecord via its 'hijack' facility or as a separate app dedicated to screencast recording since a specialised user interface can more easily be designed for that. pAVrecord can provide the basic functions required for the dedicated app but shouldn't become more bloated itself from its general purpose design (except via these possible addon modules).

But will have to come later, sorry.

William
github mcewanw

Pelo

Step by step, Paris ne s'est pas fait en un jour

#67 Post by Pelo »

About screencasting area, I am thinking about it. Merge Xvidcap for the GUI with pAVrecord, with a little bit of Drec, that would be find.
The big Bug, is the poor pelo is not a Linuxman.... a Lumixman.
Your work is a big step in renewing apps in Puppy. Thanks again, William, we shall see 'la cerise sur le gâteau' (the icing on the cake) later...Rome was not built in a day!

mcewanw
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#68 Post by mcewanw »

Pelo wrote:But 30 for video is too low, acceptable however, 120 or 150framerate would be an useful investment, even for a scottish !
But I don't think most webcams use a frame rate greater than 30 fps? Or perhaps it is only mine. User can just type '120' in the box if they want that and their video hardware supports it. The reason I hesitate to add mouse defining screencast area is that the user interface is already full and I hesitate to employ extra 'pop up' (or tabbed) config gui's to cater for more functionality - partly because I'm feeling lazy to write so much extra code (and I see a separate cut-down specialised pAVrecord for screencast only, renamed, as a better, more streamlined solution for the specialist such as you, Pelo). Maybe someday... ;-)

Like I say, it is almost summer here, and I'm wanting to escape the computer screen for a while!
github mcewanw

Pelo

A scottish in New zealand : the last try (5 points)

#69 Post by Pelo »

setting the playing area with the mouse would be fine, nevertheless. :?
The last effort....
30fps for a webcam, i don't know. i was not speaking about webcams, it's an error of me. I study the subject deeper.in fact i should have say variable bit rate.
pAVrecord sets size as 852x480 as i want : it's a big plus, avoiding a later transformation.
I am unable to do it, unless i study Linux jargon...
Say, for next winter in new Zealand, or better next winter in Scotland...
En tout cas, merci de votre convivialité.
Last edited by Pelo on Fri 22 Aug 2014, 00:08, edited 4 times in total.

mcewanw
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Re: A scottish in New zealand : the last try (5 points)

#70 Post by mcewanw »

Pelo wrote:setting the playing area with the mouse would be fine, nevertheless. :?
The last effort....
I am unable to do it, unless i study Linux jargon...
Say, for next winter in new Zealand, or better next winter in Scotland...
En tout cas, merci de votre convivialité.
Okay, it won't be right now, but I'll push that ahead in my coding priorities for later.

William
github mcewanw

sheldonisaac
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Location: Philadelphia, PA

Help, please

#71 Post by sheldonisaac »

Hi, I can't seem to record the movie from http://www.mhznetworks.org/watch/voice-violin

I see nothing in /mnt/sda3 ?

I'll attach a screenshot of pavrecord, which I've never used previously.

Thank you very much.

Sheldon
Attachments
mhz.png
(85.6 KiB) Downloaded 616 times
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Pelo

Frame rate settings to be adjusted to video ones.

#72 Post by Pelo »

ah, çà c'est dommage because all settings seem correct.
video bitrate: 30 kbps
screencast framerate: 10fps
Running in terminal give errors ?
Perhaps codecs needed to be added.

stemsee

#73 Post by stemsee »

Happy 2015 all!

I am trying to connect my desktop to a projector which has no physical video input, there is only eshare (dlna) built in. It is an i- codis CB-100 running on android 4.2.2. It is pocket sized yet projects a 60" image on a wall and looks great! Cost me £140. It does have fulll and micro usb sockets and micro-sd card reader built in. The sound is great for such a small device, and comes with a tripod, and is very light and pocketable.

Problem is I want to project my desktop through it primarily for powerpoint presentations. Using chromium browser and vGet Cast dlna, I can play video and music through it.

Theory: Would it be possible to start PAvrecord recording an video file (without sound is ok) and immediately select the file to send over dlna to the projector. The idea is that the format of the file being created and the dlna stream match so that there is as little latency as possible between changing slides etc and viewing that on the projector.

Can anyone offer advice and help?

regards stemsee

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peebee
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Screencast settings for tahrpup?

#74 Post by peebee »

Good morning

I am having great difficulty making a successful screencast (for YouTube) on tahrpup-6.0.3

Grateful if somebody could define the pavrecord-9.0.5 settings needed to make such a recording that will then play in vlc.

(I have no such problems on Slacko6 - Theora video encoding + mkv combined audio&video format gives a successful result with pavrecord-0.9.4 which plays fine in mplayer)

Many thanks
peebee

p.s. wondering why the 2 versions of pavrecord have different numbering?
ImageLxPup = Puppy + LXDE
Main version used daily: LxPupSc; Assembler of UPups, ScPup & ScPup64, LxPup, LxPupSc & LxPupSc64

mcewanw
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Re: Screencast settings for tahrpup?

#75 Post by mcewanw »

peebee wrote:Good morning

I am having great difficulty making a successful screencast (for YouTube) on tahrpup-6.0.3

Grateful if somebody could define the pavrecord-9.0.5 settings needed to make such a recording that will then play in vlc.

(I have no such problems on Slacko6 - Theora video encoding + mkv combined audio&video format gives a successful result with pavrecord-0.9.4 which plays fine in mplayer)

Many thanks
peebee

p.s. wondering why the 2 versions of pavrecord have different numbering?
One of the pavrecord versions is for DebianDog which uses Debian apt package management, the other is for Puppy. I think they are otherwise the same version inside - I can't remember changing the numbering but if I did it would just have been because I added somthing specifically needed in DebianDog.

As far as screencasts are concerned, if none of the posts above (particularly in discussions with Pelo) provide good results for you, I would suggest trying the screencast feature of ffconvert (if you have that in Tahrpup), which works great and has a few extra featureswhen it comes to screencasting along with various codec presets. I posted to Pelo regarding some ffconvert screencast settings which worked for me here (though not specifically for Youtube):

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 727#839727

Actually, ffconvert provides the settings it is using whilst doing the screencast, and once you check what the working settings are, they can then be used in pavrecord for pretty much the same result too (though not much point if ffconvert is making good screencast anyway... I can't remember which txt file ffconvert reveals its codec settings in but it is one of the ones in /tmp/ffconvert that you just need to read whilst ffconvert is doing its conversion or screencast.

Oddly, I rarely hear of anyone using ffconvert for screencasting; perhaps they don't realise it has that facility and pretty much as good as the much larger Xvidcap in my opinion.

William
github mcewanw

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peebee
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Re: Screencast settings for tahrpup?

#76 Post by peebee »

mcewanw wrote:I would suggest trying the screencast feature of ffconvert (if you have that in Tahrpup),
William
Hi William

Many thanks for the suggestions - I tried ffconvert and got the attached errors....this may be associated with tahrpup using avconv instead of ffmpeg....

666philb suggested to use SimpleScreenRecorder (QT4 based) which does seem to work in tahrpup.

He is also looking into using the Precise version of pavrecord-0.9.4.

Thanks
peebee
Attachments
ffconvert_x11grab_error.log.gz
remove flase .gz
(1.18 KiB) Downloaded 329 times
capture14069.png
(9.71 KiB) Downloaded 500 times
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Main version used daily: LxPupSc; Assembler of UPups, ScPup & ScPup64, LxPup, LxPupSc & LxPupSc64

mcewanw
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Re: Screencast settings for tahrpup?

#77 Post by mcewanw »

peebee wrote:
mcewanw wrote:I would suggest trying the screencast feature of ffconvert (if you have that in Tahrpup),
William
Hi William

Many thanks for the suggestions - I tried ffconvert and got the attached errors....this may be associated with tahrpup using avconv instead of ffmpeg....
Ah, I know what causes that ffconvert error you are seeing. ffconvert has been designed to work with either avconv or ffmpeg BUT that MP4 MPEG4-AVC preset I suggested in ffconvert expects the codec libfaac for recording aac audio whereas Precise Puppy didn't have that but rather used libvo_aacenc. I've suggested workaround that should fix that below. By the way, it shouldn't be necessary to downgrade pAVrecord when it comes to aac codecs either since it is designed to use either libfaac or libvo_aacenc as this code extract from pAVrecord 0.9.5 shows (though perhaps there are other reasons tahrpup won't work with 0.9.5 - I don't know):

Code: Select all

if [ "$(printf '%s' $AVCODECS | grep 'libfaac')" ];then
 export AACENC="libfaac"
elif [ "$(printf '%s' $AVCODECS | grep 'libvo_aacenc')" ];then
 export AACENC="libvo_aacenc"
else
 export AACENC="aac -strict experimental"
fi
I just checked the code for ffconvert and it similarly should also work with libvo_aacenc, but you need to change the preset and save it. After that it should work for you. Following my previous link of instructions for using ffconvert, once you select preset MP4 MPEG4-AVC go to the "Details" tab and where you see codec libfaac presented look inside the drop down list and hopefully you will find libvo_aacenc in there - select that and hopefully it will then work (if not there, though not so good, you could possibly get away with using libmp3lame for the audio part rather than libfaac or libvo_aacenc). Sorry, I don't have tahrpup on here so can't double check that, but certainly the ffconvert script seems to make provision for libvo_aacenc if the version of avconv has that compiled in, which I expect it does.

ffconvert is really great for doing screencasts if you can get the codecs set up as required - saves having to use all that heavy QT4 code. If you do get ffconvert screencasting to work and you note the avconv/ffmpeg parameters it is using (from /tmp/ffconvert/) you could also use the same parameters for pAVrecord screencasting. The anconv/ffmpeg convert line, including all the codec parameters it is using is shown in a file with extension .sh in /tmp/ffconvert/, which appears whilst ffconvert is processing any conversion or screencasting, but really, if ffconvert does the job you won't need pAVrecord for that anyway.

Let me know how it goes.

William
github mcewanw

Pelo

Pelo still happy with pAVrecord

#78 Post by Pelo »

I want to inform that pAVrecord still satisfy me, that has to be known
Resume : full screen : drec (Gposil)
Moving Window : Xvidcap
Fix Window : pAVrecord
And i use them, it's not a theorical thing.
I see that the topic is going elsewhere. The three ones above are the best.

Excepted with Slacko last versions. Awful !
Last edited by Pelo on Sat 23 Jul 2016, 08:34, edited 6 times in total.

Pelo

Bar reduced to a red point during screencast

#79 Post by Pelo »

Argolance (Puppy Linux France ToOpPy) would like the pAVrecord bar to be reduced to a red point during screencast. Not a bad idea.
what about pause and stop
Click on the red point would stop recording. Pause ? Huuummm...

Pelo

pAVrecord in Tahrpup (no ffmpeg available)

#80 Post by Pelo »

pAVrecord in Tahrpup (no ffmpeg available)
Download pAVrecord from PPM which will join FFMPEG too as depedancie
... if links to Ubuntu repository work :!:
Try quickpet too... links are activated to ftp arena but :( pAVrecord not listed
Waiting for tahrpup repair : type
ln -s avconv ffmpeg in terminal opened in /usr/bin/
Last edited by Pelo on Thu 01 Sep 2016, 06:58, edited 2 times in total.

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