weston/wcap/README
Kristian Høgsberg c12efd0aa7 wcap: Just make wcap-decode dump YUV4MPEG2
Instead of having a custom fork of the vpxenc tool in weston, we can
just dump raw YUV data in the YUV4MPEG2 format and feed that into the
upstream vpxenc.  This also works with theora_encoder and probably many
other encoders.
2012-07-18 15:52:13 -04:00

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WCAP Tools
WCAP is the video capture format used by Weston (Weston CAPture).
It's a simple, lossless format, that encodes the difference between
frames as run-length ecoded rectangles. It's a variable framerate
format, that only records new frames along with a timestamp when
something actually changes.
Recording in Weston is started by pressing MOD+R and stopped by
pressing MOD+R again. Currently this leaves a capture.wcap file in
the cwd of the weston process. The file format is documented below
and Weston comes with the wcap-decode tool to convert the wcap file
into something more usable:
- Extract single or all frames as individual png files. This will
produce a lossless screenshot, which is useful if you're trying to
screenshot a brief glitch or something like that that's hard to
capture with the screenshot tool.
wcap-decode takes a number of options and a wcap file as its
arguments. Without anything else, it will show the screen size and
number of frames in the file. Pass --frame=<frame> to extract a
single frame or pass --all to extract all frames as png files:
[krh@minato weston]$ wcap-snapshot capture.wcap
wcap file: size 1024x640, 176 frames
[krh@minato weston]$ wcap-snapshot capture.wcap 20
wrote wcap-frame-20.png
wcap file: size 1024x640, 176 frames
- Decode and the wcap file and dump it as a YUV4MPEG2 stream on
stdout. This format is compatible with most video encoders and can
be piped directly into a command line encoder such as vpxenc (part
of libvpx, encodes to a webm file) or theora_encode (part of
libtheora, encodes to a ogg theora file).
Using vpxenc to encode a webm file would look something like this:
[krh@minato weston]$ wcap-decode --yuv4mpeg2 ../capture.wcap |
vpxenc --target-bitrate=1024 --best -t 4 -o foo.webm -
where we select target bitrate, pass -t 4 to let vpxenc use
multiple threads. To encode to Ogg Theora a command line like this
works:
[krh@minato weston]$ wcap-decode ../capture.wcap --yuv4mpeg2 |
theora_encode - -o cap.ogv
WCAP File format
The file format has a small header and then just consists of the
indivial frames. The header is
uint32_t magic
uint32_t format
uint32_t width
uint32_t height
all CPU endian 32 bit words. The magic number is
#define WCAP_HEADER_MAGIC 0x57434150
and makes it easy to recognize a wcap file and verify that it's the
right endian. There are four supported pixel formats:
#define WCAP_FORMAT_XRGB8888 0x34325258
#define WCAP_FORMAT_XBGR8888 0x34324258
#define WCAP_FORMAT_RGBX8888 0x34325852
#define WCAP_FORMAT_BGRX8888 0x34325842
Each frame has a header:
uint32_t msecs
uint32_t nrects
which specifies a timestamp in ms and the number of rectangles that
changed since previous frame. The timestamps are typically just a raw
system timestamp and the first frame doesn't start from 0ms.
A frame consists of a list of rectangles, each of which represents the
component-wise difference between the previous frame and the current
using a run-length encoding. The initial frame is decoded against a
previous frame of all 0x00000000 pixels. Each rectangle starts out
with
int32_t x1
int32_t y1
int32_t x2
int32_t y2
followed by (x2 - x1) * (y2 - y1) pixels, run-length encoded. The
run-length encoding uses the 'X' channel in the pixel format to encode
the length of the run. That is for WCAP_FORMAT_XRGB8888, for example,
the length of the run is in the upper 8 bits. For X values 0-0xdf,
the length is X + 1, for X above or equal to 0xe0, the run length is 1
<< (X - 0xe0 + 7). That is, a pixel value of 0xe3000100, means that
the next 1024 pixels differ by RGB(0x00, 0x01, 0x00) from the previous
pixels.