Creating a gif of the current window

07 Nov 2015 #ubuntu #gui Creating a gif of the current window

BackDrop:

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

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

--x=<your_value>
--y=<your_value>
--width=<your_value>
--height=<your_value>

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

Tasdik Rahman

Creating a gif of the current window

BackDrop:

Installation

Usage:

References: