https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zOYb6iyXqs8/maxresdefault.jpg

I have wanted x11grab to be able to do things like recordMyDesktop and it does even better, because the mouse following in recordMyDesktop somewhat annoying when you watch the video you just make. The grabbing region moves as your mouse moves, which can give viewers headaches.

I did try to submit a patch to FFmpeg about a week ago when I first finished with little success, but I didn’t get any response. So I decided to just fork it and do whatever I like. I can maintain my own copy since x11grab.c is pretty independent from other parts of FFmpeg.

It’s so strange, when I searched for this mouse feature but I never read someone talked about. It looks as if everyone accepts that FFmpeg’s x11grab should have nothing to do with your mouse. I just don’t get it, why didn’t anyone wants that?

The funny unrelated thing I found during searching is some people even try to use xwininfo to get the window region, so they can supply to FFmpeg to grab that region. That’s so bad because most likely the video size isn’t going to be a standard video size. It 99.999% would be something like 987x836, even you does a conversion to standard video size, it’s still bad because you does another encoding and resize/rescale with ratio remained your video.

Screencast is better not to be resized, in my opinion, pixel-to-pixel is the best.

It’s sad that recordMyDesktop (rMD) seems like a dead project, no more commits. I see some people submitted patches and they would not be applied in anyway. I had thought about to send a email to the admin, but didn’t do it.

With my own patch to x11grab, FFmpeg does better. I can output any kind of format I want. With rMD, you have only one format, which sometimes I have problem with.

Aside from this, I want to mention about forking on GitHub. I begin to like it, I forked a few projects and did my own changes to those projects. I didn’t try to send a pull requests because I don’t care and I don’t want to wait for a reaction. I just maintain my own fork.

On GitHub, the Network tab is very useful, I can see what commits I don’t have. I wish other hosting services [whispering Google] can have same Network tab. I don’t particularly like Git, but I learned a few things since I started to fork and there is a plenty a lot about Git to learn. I never learned how to use CVS, but SVN is so easy to learn; same goes to Git vs. Hg, Git so complicated, so many commands and options, but now it’s changed.