Stepmania Online

Intro: I was experimenting/researching with the idea of a screen capture program. I came up with a decent program that does this. I just made this a few days ago. I tested it 80% or so. I did not test the possibility of running out of disk space. (I did however, add a try/catch just in case it does happen and the program will attempt to stop/quit/exit. I hope it works but, I do not recommend testing it unless you really want to help me.)

Info: Here is more info how the program works. The UI is very simple. You click "screenshot" to take a screenshot of your full screen. The image will be saved as "screenshot_#" in the directory, "C:\SCP\screenshots". (Note: I believe the application is fully set to use admin rights. It needs to be able to write files to your computer. If it cannot, the program will not function correctly and could cause issues.) If you want to make a video animation, you can start/stop a video at will. There is one thing I have to mention. This program only takes the screenshots. It will NOT convert it to an actual video. You need some video editing software to make it. Also note that this program does NOT record audio. You will have to do that yourself as well. (Sorry, I did not make it for video/audio. Just screen capture.) Anyhow, the images will be saved in "C:\SCP\videos" and will be named just like screenshots but with "video_#" instead. With numbers, it should load in order in other software to make a video. One more thing I need to point out is you may be required to download some microsoft frameworks and whatnot. You may not want to use this if you . Err, I mean... of course you do...

Screenshot:
Download:
Version: 1.9.0

edit: I test recorded a video of stepmania and it seemed to work just fine. I never found the correct speed to animate each image but just to let you know, the program tries to capture 10 screenshot every second. I tried 0.10 speed but it seemed too fast. You might try 0.20 or so. Adjust as you need to.

edit: I have to go but when I get back, I will also post the source code as well. (since this is considered free/open source.)

~ SpoOkyMagician

Neato.

If you can find a decent interface for ffmpeg for .NET, you could probably send the image data to a different thread and create videos.

Although, for fast screen capture GDI is slow and spendy (in terms of CPU resources). If you really want to make something fast, you might look into Direct3D and OpenGL for hooking applications and capturing their frames directly. Of course, that is alot more work. Its also probably why taksi (another open source capture tool) was abandoned.

Keep at it.

This program is somewhat related. It isn't for taking videos though.

http://blog.bahraniapps.com/?page_id=21

Hm... A re-sizable window that you can take screens with... That's brilliant... Why didn't I try/think of that? (I thought it would just be easier to take the whole screen. Which works but may not always be the desired result.) Also, i noticed X FPS... Not a bad idea either... However, with my current "timer" I don't think it's 100% accurate. I tested a metronome app but it's not perfect timing. Probably have to use the system time...

I will experiment with my app a bit later on. I kinda wasted my day watching tv... I have some stuff to do as well so... Maybe later on today/thru the week I will work on it... I recall the SM developers having major issues with FFMPEG... I can already tell, most likely, video will never be included in this app. :\ However, I don't mind trying to expand on the app somewhat. I would like to at least use re-sizable windows. Anyway, I will let you know if I make anymore progress on this.

edit: I noticed a few changes I could make. When I made this the first time, I used two different windows for screenshots/videos. I should be able to remove one and use both together one way or another. I also decided to make the window viewable/resizable. Hopefully, once this is updated, it will be more easier to use. One other thing I should mention, I found out you can just use a generic "Exception" that catches all it seems. I will use this instead. (To be safe.) I am also adding more helpful message boxes that will display useful information about the program. If it's a warning, just keep the message in mind and do whatever it says. If it says error, the program will tell you what happened and close. (If you ever encounter the program not responding, please close it and let me know what happened so I can try fixing it.

edit: Ah finally... It took me a bit to understand how the bitmap stuff works again but I figured it out finally. The newly updated screenshot function works perfectly now. I wanna see if I can make the window a bit smaller though. Otherwise, it works great. :) Now I just need to redo the video part of the code and it should be ready to release. :)

edit: Updated download above. Feel free to give it a try. Let me know if you find any bugs. (version 1.2.0)

~ SpoOkyMagician