morgant / mavid

Lossless X11 screencast recording on OpenBSD using ffmepg & sndio

mavid

OVERVIEW

mavid (Make Video) is utility to record screencasts of your X11 desktop using ffmpeg, inspired by maim.

By default, it records lossless video & audio using the libx264rgb & flac encoders, respectively, into a single Matroska (.mkv) container file. The lossless MKV recording can then be transcoded into smaller, lossy formats in different container formats. This generally reduces CPU load while recording, which is helpful on slower processors, but produces significantly larger recording files.

NOTE: It currently only supports OpenBSD due to its reliance on sndio and especially OpenBSD's sndioctl.

PREREQUISITES

• OpenBSD
• sndio
• ffmpeg
• slop

USAGE

1. Install the OpenBSSD ffmpeg and slop packages:

pkg_add ffmpeg slop

2. Enable OpenBSD audio recording, if you haven't already:

sysctl kern.audio.record=1

2. Record your entire display:

mavid <file>

Alternatively, you can select a portion of your display to record prior to starting recording by executing mavid -s:

mavid -s <file>

3. Press Ctrl-C to cancel recording. (Pressing q, which normally also stops ffmpeg recording because of the way video & audio are being piped.)

Reference

• FFMPEG Capture/Desktop (Lossless Recording)
• fauxstream (example of piping x11grab video & sndio audio into a single file with ffmpeg)
• My old x11record utility

LICENSE

Released under the MIT License.