HELP !!! Capture desktop into mp4

[tauhid shaikh]

Hello,

I am trying to use the SharpFFmpeg to capture the desktop and save it as a video file, preferably into an mp4 file to decrease the file size.

I need some help, how to use the SharpFFmpeg to accomplish the task.

I could develop an application which takes screen shots, and then passes them as stream and compresses it to one "avi" file. The problem is the compression technique used. A 2-3 mins file take around 20 Mbs of disk space which is not affordable.

i believe the SharpFFmpeg.dll has all the fuctions to convert a stream to an mp4.
Can anyone please guide me through the encoding..

for the moment, encoding a readily available "avi" file into mp4 file will do to demonstrate the conversion.

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tshaikh@adiance.com

[Charlie Mason]

Well if your program can supply the raw frames you want to be encoded then FFMPEG can certainly encode it into an MPEG4 stream and write that to an mp4 file.

SharpFFMPEG the .Net wrapper around FFMPEG is a little rough around the edges. I had to use it to do some video decoding and found I had to make some changes to get it to work properly. I did not test the encoding parts (which you will need) but they appear complete, although will probably need more tweaking.

There is a new, very similar if slightly more complete library, which is part of the Tao Framework project. In the end I switched to using that, you may want to have a look at that as well. Although the interface to FFMPEG it provides is almost identical. I was able to swap my app over to it in literally 5 minutes.

To learn how to actually use the FFMPEG library to do the encoding their are some tutorials in C on the net if you search for them.

Transcodeing (converting one video format to another) is more complicated, as you have to go through the whole decoding process as well as the encoding process, so its probably not a good test for you. As you will need to do a lot of extra work.

Charlie M