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June 7, 2010
LICEcap!

We've just released a new piece of open source software for Windows, called LICEcap! It allows one to create animated screen captures. I know, there's a lot of software out there that does this already, but none of them are both free and meet my needs, so we made LICEcap.

LICEcap has a nice UI (in that you position/size the window where you want to capture, and can move it around while recording). We support writing to .GIF directly (big thanks/credit/blame to Schwa for getting the palette generation working as well as it does), as well as to a new format called .LCF.

LCF compresses by taking a series of frames, say, 20 frames, and then dividing each frame into slices, approx 128x16px each. Each slice is then compared to the same slice on the previous frame, and (if different) encoded directly after the previous frame. zlib is used to remove redundancy (often slices don't completely change from frame to frame, i.e. scrolls or small updates will compress very well). This is all done in 16bpp, and the end result is quite good compression, and lossless (well, 16bpp lossless) quality. REAPER supports playing back the .LCF files, too. The biggest down side is high memory use during compression/decompression (20 frames of 640x480x16bpp is about 12MB, and for smooth CPU distribution you end up using twice that).

I should mention that the primary reason for us making this tool was the desire to post animated gifs of new features in REAPER with the changelog. Hopefully we'll follow through on that.

On a related note, tomorrow (or soonish), I plan to post my latest additions on how to make OS X applications not perform terribly (new one: avoid avoid AVOID CGBitmapContextCreateImage() like the plague. HOLY CRAP it is bad to use). Apple: please, for the love of God, either make your documentation a Wiki, or hire someone who actually writes (multi-platform) applications with your APIs to write documentation.






9 Comments:
Posted by fredv on Tue 08 Jun 2010 at 01:17 from 195.6.68.x
That's so nice !
Just one thing is missing : the ability to have a hotkey to Pause when Licecap is recording. It would allow to pause without showing the mouse going to the bottom of the window.


Posted by Tale on Tue 08 Jun 2010 at 01:26 from 77.168.115.x
Nice of you guys to make LICEcap open source. Thanks!


Posted by Bod on Tue 08 Jun 2010 at 05:20 from 81.130.95.x
Looks really cool. I still find it astounding that you can find time to work on stuff like this as well as Reaper. nice one J.

Bod.


Posted by QOAL on Tue 08 Jun 2010 at 14:52 from 217.42.42.x
Loving this, not sure what I use I have for it, but it's cool all the same.
Good work.


Posted by Justin on Wed 09 Jun 2010 at 21:34 from 64.81.54.x
And 1.1 is out, with hotkey support. Thank schwa for that one! :)


Posted by dave on Thu 10 Jun 2010 at 04:05 from 114.247.10.x
Nice job, but I can't start recording on my test...after giving a file name in the filedialog, nothing happens, the RECORD button still enabled while STOP button gray. I'm using Windows Server 2003, doesn't it work here?


Posted by Malcolm on Sun 13 Jun 2010 at 05:04 from 118.208.129.x
Hi Justin,

Thanks for LICEcap. It's a cool tool for animated GIF's.

Any plans to expand the functionality to include audio, and output to other formats?

I use Camtasia Studio for the video side of my screencasts and Reaper for the audio production. Would be nice to be able to use your stuff for the whole process.

Cheers,

Malcolm.


Posted by Justin on Sun 13 Jun 2010 at 10:56 from 64.81.54.x
you can always record to LCF using licecap, then edit/sync it with audio in REAPER, and render to MP4 there (if you install ffmpeg). Just a thought, heh...


Posted by Curvespace on Mon 28 Jun 2010 at 09:43 from 78.86.194.x
Hi Justin,

Great job on the app. I'm encouraging QA guys at work to start using it to attach screencasts to bug reports - it's got a nice, simple interface and small footprint for this kinda thing.

Can we expect an OS X version sometime in the future?

Also, though you may have already done this - it'd be a good platform to encourage the REAPER beta guys to use on the forums.

Thanks again,
Nick


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