The Boyhood of Raleigh by Sir John Everett Millais, oil on canvas, 1870. A seafarer tells the young Sir Walter Raleigh and his brother the story of what happened out at sea Image source: Wikipedia.org
Most software are created for business purposes. But some software are created to solve real life problems. This is the story behind CaptureMe…While we where building up a new Open Source tech related website with some friends we needed a software to create some software reviews and tutorials. The problem was that there was not a single software out there that:
- Works out of the box
- Works on all Linux distributions
- No fuzz, Just screencasting !
Every software that we tested in Linux, had some kind of problem or it was not doing what it supposed to do. So I had to deal with this ASAP!
Fortunately, Linux and open source community in general, has created some wonderful tools and so I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. What we needed for the software, was already out there. The only thing that was missing was just to pick them and add them to a software in such way that it would do what it was intended to.
This tools are :
- FFmpeg
- Zenity
- Bash Scripting
We can read on Wikipedia page for FFmpeg:
FFmpeg is a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. The most notable parts of FFmpeg are libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library, and the ffmpeg command line program for transcoding multimedia files.
We can read on Wikipedia page for Zenity:
Zenity is a cross-platform program that allows the execution of GTK+ dialog boxes in command-line and shell scripts.
So we have the recording “Kernel” which is the FFmpeg libraries, and we have “Zenity” for dealing with some simple user interactions for Bash Script applications. And that was it ! Last but not least, I chose the name “CaptureMe” because it is simple and descriptive as is the software its self
Utappia 
