Re: [VANILLA-LIST:3160] Developers Must Play

[Karthik Arumugham <karthik@arumugham.com>]

About a year and a half ago, I played around with making some web-viewable
recordings... This involved running an X server on my Mac, running the
client off my Linux box onto the X server on the Mac, then using a screen
recording program (I think it was called CameraMan or something) to record
the screen into a QuickTime movie. Then I clipped it and converted it.

I played around with various compression... I got the best results from
turning it into an animated gif (was quite a bit smaller than mpeg I
think).

Jeff and I were discussing this last night, and wondered if there is any
way to do this in Unix. Anyone know of a similar Unix utility? I looked
around a bit and can't seem to find one.

Here's another idea: we can take something like xwd and modify it to run
continuously and generate an animated gif instead of a single file. This
might be a bit easier than making the client write out a movie file
itself.

- Karthik

On Wed, 10 May 2000, Tom Holub wrote:

> I think a per-frame fork() is insane.  What do you plan to do with it,
> write a gif for every frame?  In a 90 minute game that's 54000 files, not
> to mention 54000 fork()'s, and assuming 10k files, 540 megabytes of disk
> space.  (If you're using xwd, it's more like 150 gigabytes).
> 
> It would make a lot more sense to build the movie in the client using
> an actual movie format.
>  -Tom