Creating a gif of the current window

Creating a gif of the current window

BackDrop:

Everybody at some time of their life as netizen would have seen something like this

http://i.stack.imgur.com/0B664.gif

How about we create one?

Well recently when I was building a Calculator app, I wanted a gif image to be there in the README.md so as to show the usage of the app.

I wrote a How hard can Building a calclator be right? for the same some time back.

Did some googling and found out byzanz-record as the tool perfect for me

Installation

Beginning for 14.04 and above, it is available in the universe repository

$ sudo apt-get install byzanz

If you are on a system older than that

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fossfreedom/byzanz
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install byzanz

Usage:

We are gonna be using this tool from the command prompt itself as GUI’s would just slow down the process. Now for that we just need four things

Now how do we get that?

run

$ xwininfo

and point on the window which you want to record. And it will return you the required values and a little extra information too!

tasdik@Acer:~/Desktop/pyCalc$ xwininfo

xwininfo: Please select the window about which you
          would like information by clicking the
          mouse in that window.

xwininfo: Window id: 0x740003f "Calculator"

  Absolute upper-left X:  984
  Absolute upper-left Y:  509
  Relative upper-left X:  0
  Relative upper-left Y:  0
  Width: 284
  Height: 169
  Depth: 24
  Visual: 0x20
  Visual Class: TrueColor
  Border width: 0
  Class: InputOutput
  Colormap: 0x22 (installed)
  Bit Gravity State: NorthWestGravity
  Window Gravity State: NorthWestGravity
  Backing Store State: NotUseful
  Save Under State: no
  Map State: IsViewable
  Override Redirect State: no
  Corners:  +984+509  -98+509  -98-90  +984-90
  -geometry 284x169-88-80

tasdik@Acer:~/Desktop/pyCalc$

There now, I have got my values

tasdik@Acer:~/Desktop/pyCalc$ byzanz-record --duration=45 --x=984 --y=509 --width=290 --height=170 out.gif

This will immediately start the recording for the Calculator window until 45 seconds. So be sure to finish whatever you want to do before that.

Here’s is what I got from the above script

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tasdikrahman/pyCalc/master/pyCalc_usage.gif

References: