capturing a desktop demonstration as a movie

[guru at Sisis.de]

El día Wednesday, March 01, 2006 a las 10:17:11AM +0100, Svein Halvor Halvorsen escribió:

> On 2/28/06, guru at sisis.de <guru at sisis.de> wrote:
> > Is there somehow a tool (in the ports) to capture a (KDE-) desktop of
> > FreeBSD while doing a presentation of some kind of software to create
> > a movie of this, for example as a *.avi file?
> 
> You could go via vnc. It can save vnc-sessions to special vnc-files,
> which you later could convert to an avi, mpg, swf, whatever using e.g
> transcode. Both are in ports.
> 
> Svein Halvor

Hello,

Just to record this and maybe for the help of others looking for
the same in the future:

I followed the hints about 'vnc2swf' and installed from the ports:

/usr/ports/net/tightvnc
/usr/ports/net/vnc2swf

There is nearly nothing todo or to configure, just do (if you
want to have all on one system):

- launch your desktop (mine is KDE)
- create some other user which session you later want to capture
- open a xterm and 'su' to that user: 'su - joana'
- as 'joana' start now the VNC X-Server:

  $ vncserver :1

  it will ask your for a password  which is later used to connect to this
  X-Server and which is stored forever in a file;

- but for now kill the VNC X-Server again with:

  $ vncserver -kill :1

- in the HOME of 'joana' you now have the file /home/joana/.vnc/xstartup
  which was created by the 1st launch of 'vncserver' and which you want
  to modify the same way like any .xinitrc file, mine says:

  $ cat /home/joana/.vnc/xstartup
  #!/bin/sh
  exec startkde

- boot up the VNC X-Server again which now comes up with KDE desktop
  as well (per default it comes up with 'twm' and 'xterm' which does
  not look so nice :-))

- from your own KDE (or whatever) connect to 'joana' desktop with

  $ vnc2swf joana.swf :1

  type in the password stored with the VNC X-Server and you will get
  'joana' desktop in a big window on your desktop; the tool 'vnc2swf'
  acts like a normal VNC viewer, but pressing key F9 will start the
  capturing into the file 'joana.swf'

move it later over to a webspace and play it with your browser Konqueror,
Firefox or whatever...

really nice tool!

	matthias
-- 
Matthias Apitz / Sisis Informationssysteme GmbH
ein Tochterunternehmen der OCLC PICA B.V. Leiden (NL)
D-82041 Oberhaching, Gruenwalder Weg 28g
Fon: +49 89 / 61308-351, Fax: -399, Mobile +49 170 4527211
http://www.sisis.de/~guru/