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Version 26.1 by Drunk Monkey on 2022-01-27 16:23
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1 {{box cssClass="floatinginfobox" title="**Contents**"}}
2 {{toc depth="3" start="2" numbered="true"/}}
3 {{/box}}
4
5 == Required Programs ==
6
7 1. [[VLC Media Player>>https://www.videolan.org/vlc/]] - required for playback of just about any kind of video content you can imagine
8 1. [[7-zip>>https://www.7-zip.org]] - you will need this to extract the contents of the FFmpeg files, which are stored as a 7z archive.  Mac OSX will use [[Keka>>https://www.keka.io/en/]]
9 1. [[FFmpeg>>http://ffmpeg.org/download.html]] - the ultimate Swiss Army Knife multitool of multimedia encoding/decoding
10
11 == Installation ==
12
13 1. VLC installs are straight forward.  Run the installer and you're done.
14 1. FFmpeg is a bit more complicated, and it depends on your platform.
15
16 ----
17
18 (% class="row" %)
19 (((
20 (% class="col-xs-12 col-xs-6" style="border-right:black solid 1px;" %)
21 (((
22 === Windows ===
23
24 1. Run the VLC installer
25 1. Install 7-zip
26 1. Extract the contents of the FFmpeg zip file into a suitable directory.  I going to use C:\Local\ffmpeg\ as my FFmpeg installation location for this example.  You should see something similar to this:
27 [[image:image-20220127221835-1.png]](((
28
29 The contents of the ffmpeg filder should look like this:
30 [[image:image-20220127225738-2.png]]
31 \\Select all the files and move them into the installation directory.  That is C:\Local\ffmpeg\ in this example.
32 [[image:image-20220127225847-3.png]]
33
34 )))
35 1. Next, add the location of the ffmpeg\bin directory to the system path.  This is necessary so you can run the command from the command line from a command shell.
36 \\Go to the file explorer, and look in the left hand folder list for "This PC" or "My PC" or whatever it is called on your system. 
37 [[image:image-20220127230601-5.png]]
38 \\When you find it, right click in it to bring up the local context menu and select Properties
39 [[image:image-20220127230404-4.png]]
40 \\In newer versions of Windows, the properties page looks like this:
41 [[image:image-20220127230803-6.png]]
42 \\Look for the "Advanced system settings" (right middle in the above screenshot) and click on it
43 [[image:image-20220127230949-7.png]]
44 \\Select "Environment Variables" and the following screen will appear
45 [[image:image-20220127231106-8.png]]
46 \\In the top half of the User variables section is an entry called "Path".  Select it and click on "Edit".  Do not edit the path of the System variables section unless you know what you are doing.
47 [[image:image-20220127231323-9.png]]
48 \\Click on "New" and add the following "C:\Local\ffmpeg\bin"
49 [[image:image-20220127231805-12.png]]
50 \\and then click on the "Move up" button until that new entry appears at the top of the list
51 [[image:image-20220127231836-13.png]]
52 \\Click on OK, and ffmpeg will be available for use on the command line. 
53 [[image:image-20220127232109-14.png]]
54 \\Click on OK to close the Environment Variables settings, and then click on OK to close the System Properties.
55
56 1. Start a command line window by typing cmd.exe into the search bar and open the Command Prompt
57 [[image:image-20220127232411-15.png]]
58
59 1. in that command prompt, type in "ffmpeg" and you should see this:
60 [[image:image-20220127232635-16.png]]
61 \\If you get an error like this, either you typed in the command incorrectly (as I did in the following example) or you did not configured your user path correctly and you have to go back and correct it
62 [[image:image-20220127232731-17.png]]
63 \\You are now ready to capture video
64 )))
65
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67 (((
68 === Mac OSX ===
69
70 1. Install VLC
71 1. Install Keka
72 )))
73 )))
74
75 ----
76
77 == Video Capture ==
78
79 ----
80
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83 (% class="col-xs-12 col-xs-6" style="border-right:black solid 1px;" %)
84 (((
85 === Windows Video Capture ===
86
87 Open a command window, and run the following commands:
88
89 >(% style="font-size:14px" %)cd Desktop
90 >(% style="font-size:14px" %)ffmpeg -f gdigrab -t 6 -draw_mouse 1 -framerate 60 -i desktop -c:v libx264rgb -crf 0 -preset ultrafast screenCapture.mkv
91
92 (% style="font-size:14px" %)This will create a video file called "screenCapture.mkv" on your desktop that you can replay using VLC Media Player.
93
94 (% style="font-size:14px" %)The parameters to the ffmpeg command have the following meaning
95
96 (% class="min" %)
97 |-f gdigrab|gdigrab is the windows framebuffer, where the screen is stored
98 |-t 6|capture 6 seconds of video and exit.  3600 = 1 hour, 14400 = 4 hours
99 |-draw_mouse 1|capture the mouse pointer
100 |-i desktop|capture the entire desktop -  remember to maximize your window
101 |-c:v libx264rgb|this video encoder will preserve the rgb color values losslessly
102 |-crf 0|lossless compression
103 |-preset ultrafast|save the data as quickly as possible, don't waste too much time compressing the data
104
105 If you want to save the for long term storage, you can losslessly compress the file even further with the following command
106
107 >(% style="font-size:14px" %)fmpeg -i screenCapture.mkv -c:v libx264rgb -crf 0 -preset veryslow screenCaptureS.mkv
108
109 It'll take a while, but it will create a video file that should be less than half the size of the original.
110 )))
111
112 (% class="col-xs-12 col-xs-6" %)
113 (((
114 === Mac Video Capture ===
115
116 sfasd
117
118 asdfasdf
119 )))
120 )))