How to screen capture games

[curvedinfinity]

I had to screen capture my own OpenGL application a while ago, and it was a real pain in the butt to do on Linux. There are plenty of programs that screen capture from the X buffer, but that is very processor-intensive and slow. However, I did find one option that actually captures directly from the graphics card: Yukon.

Yukon is fairly straight forward, but is relatively new, so it doesn't have any install packages or GUIs.

1. Get the dependencies:
   

   sudo apt-get install build-essential subversion yasm mencoder libasound2-dev libgl1-mesa-dev

2. Get the source (make sure to accept the certificate):
   

   mkdir yukon
   cd yukon
   svn co https://devel.neopsis.com/svn/seom/branches/packetized-stream seom
   svn co https://devel.neopsis.com/svn/yukon/branches/rewrite yukon
   cd seom
   ./configure && make && sudo make install
   cd ../yukon
   ./configure && make && sudo make install

3. Install the yukon config files:
   

   sudo mkdir -p /etc/yukon/system
   sudo cp sysconfig /etc/yukon/system/default
   mkdir ~/.yukon
   cp tools/yukon.conf ~/.yukon/conf

4. Edit the preference file:
   

   gedit ~/.yukon/conf

   Change
   

   # OUTPUT = file:///tmp/yukon.seom

   to
   

   OUTPUT = file:///home/<your user>/Desktop/recording.seom

5. Run your app through yukon:
   

   yukon glxgears

6. Press F8 to start recording and F8 again to stop.

Now you should have a recording.seom file on your desktop. To convert this to a usable filetype, use yukon's tool:

1. Convert the seom file to a y4m file using yukon's tool:
   

   ./filter ~/Desktop/recording.seom > ~/Desktop/recording.y4m

2. Convert the y4m to mpg with mencoder:
   

   mencoder ~/Desktop/recording.y4m -of mpeg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg1video -oac copy -o ~/Desktop/recording.mpg

Hopefully this works for everyone. There may be some dependencies I forgot about, so please report back.

[gershon]

great post man, one small comment, to make it work here i need to execute

`sudo ldconfig`

after installing the compiled libs

[riking]

The author has moved his code to Github.
As such, you need to change these lines in installation (Step 2):

svn co https://devel.neopsis.com/svn/seom/branches/packetized-stream seom
svn co https://devel.neopsis.com/svn/yukon/branches/rewrite yukon

To these:

git clone https://github.com/wereHamster/seom.git
git clone https://github.com/wereHamster/yukon.git

If necessary, `sudo apt-get install git` first.