# Capturing video from Linux

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/capturing-video-from-linux/280346>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [December 17, 2004, 3:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/capturing-video-from-linux/280346 "2004-12-17T15:13:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Atrael](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Atrael](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Atrael)\
**Post date:** [December 17, 2004, 3:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/capturing-video-from-linux/280346/1 "2004-12-17T15:13:30Z")

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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](http://xvidcap.sourceforge.net/) 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.

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**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\
**Post date:** [December 17, 2004, 4:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/capturing-video-from-linux/280346/2 "2004-12-17T16:11:06Z")

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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.

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**Author:** ![Atrael](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Atrael](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Atrael)\
**Post date:** [December 17, 2004, 4:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/capturing-video-from-linux/280346/3 "2004-12-17T16:41:58Z")

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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.

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**Author:** ![Atrael](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Atrael](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Atrael)\
**Post date:** [December 20, 2004, 5:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/capturing-video-from-linux/280346/4 "2004-12-20T17:21:20Z")

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