Port to Linux

[PaulBGD]

If you want to test it, just run ./linux/capture.sh with the same arguments that you'd pass to the swift binary.

[PaulBGD]

This can easily be ported to Mac, replacing all of the Swift code. The changes we'd need to make to the bash script are here: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Capture/Desktop#OSX

[matheuss]

@PaulBGD thank you for the PR!

I'm afraid we can't use ffmpeg for the job – at least on macOS. I spent countless hours on it (history | grep ffmpeg | wc -l currently returns 839 😛) and I'm almost sure that it isn't a viable solution:

Recording the entire screen with ffmpeg -f avfoundation -i 1 -y test.mp4:

Recording the entire screen with aperture.js:

Besides that, we can't record a section of the screen with ffmpeg on macOS 😕

It would be awesome if you could gather some benchmarks from ffmpeg on Linux 😄 Also, do you know how to record the screen natively on Linux, like I did with Swift?

[PaulBGD]

Yeah we could do it native, but ffmpeg is incredibly fast on Linux. I'll grab some benchmarks.

[doot0]

Yo @PaulBGD, I'm curious about those benchmarks - have you had any time to run any? 😅

[PaulBGD]

ffmpeg could record 345 frames using 1 CPU core, recordMyDesktop could barely record 60 using the same core. From what I can tell its because rMD uses a custom encoder that is nowhere as fast as ffmpeg. With the time that we'd have to put in to make a native implementation as fast as ffmpeg ourselves, I think ffmpeg is the better choice.

[PaulBGD]

This is ready to go!