Re: [Visualpython-users] Why no screenshot function?

[Guy K. K. <g....@ma...>]

On Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:58:44 Bruce Sherwood wrote:
> And there is PIL, the Python Imaging Library, which can do lots of image 
> conversions. But the fundamental problem is that you'll have a
>  low-resolution  bitmap image, which isn't good for many applications.

I've been thinking about this issue in the past as well. Here are some 
thoughts that crossed me:

 * Screenshot utilities exist for the different operating systems

 * They are different in usage, and they require manual interaction

 * A *scriptable* tool that would work from within Visual could be desirable:
   - which is platform independent, and works the same way on all platforms
   - which just dumps the current frame to a file
   - potentially just as a PIL image, which could be saved easily to any
     image file format

 * Benefits of such a tool:
   - easy, independent grabbing of frame
   - later easy joining of frames to a movie sequence possible
   - especially suitable for non-interactive simulation/rendering
   - I'm using ffmpeg2theora all the time to aggregate PNG sequences
     into an Ogg Theora movie file that can be played with any modern
     browser

So, even though the quality of a grabbed frame like that would be inferior to 
a POVray rendered scene, for certain applications (e. g. creating movies, 
simple documentation of a current state) it would be by far good enough.

If someone has an easy solution, you'd have my vote to embed it into Visual!

Guy


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Guy K. Kloss
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