mircapture

Wrapper for mirscreencast and ffmpeg to record Unity 8 desktop videos.

Introduction

Using mirscreencast to capture recordings of a Unity 8 desktop session on my Dell XPS15, which has a UHD display, requires tens of Gigabytes of storage per minute because mirscreencast captures the native resolution using rawvideo at 60fps.

This script automatically determines (hopefully) sane defaults for mirscreencast and directs its output at a FIFO, then ffmpeg starts real-time encoding from the FIFO using similarly sane defaults.

The result is that 1080p captures of a Unity 8 desktop session can now be recorded using tens of Megabytes per minute.

Requirements

Currently mircapture has only been tested on Ubuntu (Yakkety Yak) 16.10.

apt install ffmpeg mir-utils netcat

Usage

• Clone this repository:

  • git clone https://github.com/flexiondotorg/mircapture.git

• Log in to a Unity 8 desktop session.

• Start a Terminal and run the following to capture the desktop:

  • ./mircapture

• When you've recorded what you want, return to the terminal where mircapture is running and just press q to stop ffmpeg.

  • mircapture will cleanly stop mirscreencast for you, no manual pkill -9 required.

• You'll have a new video in your home directory.

  • Named something like: Mircapture_1920x1080-30.00fps-16304-0939-50.mp4

Changes

Summary of changes.

1.0

• Initial release.
• Local capture and encoding only.

To Do

• Add options for -local, -tx, -rx so that captures can optionally be streamed to a remote host for encoding.
• Add optional audio input selection for recording voice overs.
• Make mircapture a snap. May require the utility interface which is not yet available.