Capturing video from Linux

Hello all, once again I find myself turning to my fellow dopers in hopes of salvation. I’ve recently been asked to help create (or rather re-create) a video that shows some scenes from a desktop display. The way it was originally shot was by pointing a camera at the screen, and recording that. Obviously that produced some very lousy images when the final product was displayed on a large Plasma. What I’m looking for is an easy method of capturing a window in Linux as a movie file. I can do single screen shots of course, but findind a program that will let me capture a minute or two of screen activity is proving difficult. So far I’ve played around with Xvidcap but haven’t had a whole lot of success. Some of that may be because I’m fairly unfamiliar with Linux, so I could possibly not be doing something right. While that program will produce a .mpg file, it doesn’t seem to be capturing at a very high rate, and seems to just fall apart at anything over 30 frames.

So my question. Does anyone know of another easier to use program for linux that will allow me to do this? Or, is there a physical device that I can use to hook up the actual VGA output to a DVI input on a camera? If that makes sense. Something that I could hook up right to the computer’s video output that would let me go right into the Digital Camera?

Thanks for any and all help.

I don’t know much about Linux, but I do know that it has a perfectly fine VNC server, which means that you can open a VNC session from a Mac or a Windows PC and do your vidcap-to-quicktime thingie from there if you can’t locate a good video capture sw for Linux and get it to work for you.

Hmmm…didn’t even think of that…thanks AHunter…I’ll play around with that a bit. I don’t readily have a windows box on the same network, but I think I can work that out somehow. But I’ll also keep hoping that someone has done this and has a great idea.

I’m going to bump this once for the Monday crowd, just in case someone didn’t catch it on Friday.