v002 Screen Capture 2.0.2
v002 Screen Capture allows you to capture your entire desktop, or a portion of it, to an image and further process it within Quartz Composer or supported host applications. This can be used to sample other application’s windows as a source input for post processing, texture mapping on to models, etc.
Sample Modul8, Processing, Flash, Unity3D, Blender, Torque, Jitter, GEM, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office, Terminal, or any other Mac OS X application with a GUI live in realtime, and mix them in Quartz Composer, VDMX, Coge, or your Quartz Composer host of choice.
v002 Screen Capture is fully GPU accelerated, and therefore is very fast. It is possible to capture greater than HD resolutions in realtime at 60fps.
Version 2.0 has some new features, specifically capture screen selection, interactive window selection, and capture area visualization.
Please note that v002 Screen Capture 2.0.1 does not support Mac OS X 10.5 or Quartz Composer 3.0 due to use of new 10.6 only technologies. Version 1.0 is still available for download
Changelog:
2.0.2:
- Fix architecture of background helper to support Core Duo/Core Solo 32 bit only systems
- Add optional parameter to allow or limit capture bounds to remove off screen glitch
- Code cleanup
2.0.1:
- Fix embarrassing math exception causing crash with some options enabled
- Fix IOSurface leak
- Increase reliability of background helper application
- Increase reliability of plugin IOSurface handling
2.0:
- Support for image output in Quartz Composer editor
- Added capturing on screens other than the main screen
- Added interactive window selection
- Added capture area visualization
- Added optional window title bar clipping
- Fix colorspace to exactly match monitor color calibration, no unintentional color shifts
1.0:
- Initial Release
December 7th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Wow this is a really really wicked plug in man!!! I finally have a way to get maya/processing/structuresynth/opengl etc. into qtz or vdmx, this is sooo dope. Thanks! and thanks especially for the source, I am learning cocoa and looking at this is very helpful.
December 9th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
14:47:38.058 [”v002ScreenCapture” @ “Macro Patch”] > Initialization failed
I read your read-me file, any other suggestions to why it will not work.
December 9th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
You cant use it from within Quartz Composer, due to how the sharing works . You can only use it from within an other application which loads the plugin/Quartz Composer Composition I provided. This is admittedly a limitation, and something im looking to work around, but for now, it should work within VDMX or any other Quartz Patch host.
December 14th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
Thanks for sharing - this is a real beauty and just what I was looking for.
I’m having a small problem with my setup - I can’t seem to capture the full display on a 30″ at 2560×1600 - even maxed out the sliders in VDMX will only give me 1440 x 900. I’ve tried tweaking the canvas size, and fixing the QC output size too, but no dice.
I have a secondary display, but that’s running at 1600 x 1200, so I don’t think that’s the problem. Maybe…
Is this something I can tweak in the code? Appreciate that it might be expecting a bit much to capture so much screen real estate… I’m a newb to QC, but it looks as if the code gets the parameters from whatever output size the desktop is running in. Could be wildly wrong there.
December 14th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Hi Smashcut, I have a newer test build coming soon, which lets you select the active capture screen and may fix your issue…
December 14th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
Awesome, thanks so much vade
January 11th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
hi!
i’m relly looking for an Screen Capture plugin that work with modul8, i’ve tried to edit it in QC but didn’t work so far, there is some way that may work in it?
wonderful work you do all the plugins are very estable.
any light will be apprecciated
thank you good 2009
Joshua d heredia
January 13th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Hi Joshua. If I recall correctly, Modul8 plays Quartz Composer patches via an Quicktime Movie Player method, which does not allow ‘unsafe patches’ (IE, any 3rd party plugins to be loaded. You might be able to work around this by installing the Kineme 3D unsafe patches plugin (ironic, no?). Try it out. Id love to know if it works!
January 23rd, 2009 at 9:17 am
I’ve tried your plug in with Isadora (http://www.troikatronix.com/isadora.html) and so far it works great!
Thanks for this and all your excellent work/information on your sites.
I’ll buy you a pint,
Gavin
January 23rd, 2009 at 9:32 am
Hi gavspav, thanks for letting me know. Thats great!
February 14th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
still no sucess on modul8…..
April 24th, 2009 at 7:16 am
Hi,
Tried adding your plugin to the QCTV example. First, added the file to the compositions directory and modified the following line in AppController.m
static NSString* _compositionNames[] = {@”v002ScreenCapture-VDMX”,nil};
Looks like it reads in the plugin because I get a parameters windows for the origin and window size.
However, the window is black, no capturing evident no matter the origin, width, height settings etc:-(
Any idea what’s going on?
Thanks,
Rod.
April 24th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
Working now! Cheers…
April 25th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Rod, just wondering what you changed in the QCTV example other than the value of the compositionNames array to have the plugin running?
Thanks,
John
July 23rd, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Hi there,
I have been playing around with the plugin - works great. However it would be a really nice detail to be able to output the image from a second screen. Any plans for adding that?
July 23rd, 2009 at 4:25 pm
By the way - I’ve had fun playing around with this little app:
http://developer.apple.com/SampleCode/QuartzComposerLiveDV/index.html
(note to others: unpack the build.sit to find a compiled version of the application)
If I load the screen capture composition into QuartzComposerLiveDV I am able to output the capture to DV via firewire thus enabling me to record directly from my mac to a hd camcorder in DV quality
July 30th, 2009 at 9:35 am
Hi again,
I thought you might be interested in this tutorial I created that makes use of your plugin. Hope you don’t mind
http://www.udart.dk/2009/07/30/the-5-video-mixer-how-to-do-a-dv-screen-cast-through-firewire/
July 30th, 2009 at 9:52 am
Thanks, thats great!
January 3rd, 2010 at 10:23 pm
[…] v002 Screen Capture 2.0 is out, which offers a slew of new features, most importantly full functionality within the Quartz Composer editor application. Check out the demo video below for more information. Be sure to watch in HD on Vimeo to get all the details. […]
January 4th, 2010 at 2:03 am
yeah!!! thanks for that!
January 10th, 2010 at 1:15 pm
This is awesome! Great work. Would it be possible to have this plugin pull in an input from a network VNC server? that could make for some spectacular multidisplay/video wall functions.
January 10th, 2010 at 1:20 pm
Thats an interesting idea. I don’t think it is in the scope of this plugin though. If you want tiled video walls using Quartz Composer, take a long hard look at Quartz Composer Visualizer, included in the dev tools.
May 20th, 2010 at 1:58 am
Anyway to directly select the captured window basen on the application name and the windows name, allowing us to capture on a scriptable way?
May 20th, 2010 at 12:25 pm
HVP: thats an interesting idea actually… in theory I think with the CGWindowList API its possible to get the name of a window and its global windowserver id, and thus the bounds from it. Maybe another plugin that feeds the Screen Capture patch that provides a dynamic list of windows, their names, and spits out the coordinates of the window you have selected in the list?
My only concern with that is that ports for plugins technically should not be dynamic/change on the fly… But I think its doable. Hm… Thats a good idea actually. You could even add gentle polling or a callback so the capture area updates if you move the window. Don’t expect this over night
June 13th, 2010 at 6:33 pm
Hi Vade,
thanks a lot for this great plugin! It is really useful!
However, I have a little problem: When I capture a Processing window which is rendered in OPENGL then the captured screen in VDMX turns out to look darker than the original window. This curiousily changes when I move another window partly on top of the Processing window or sometimes even when I keep the focus on the other window, even when I moved it out of sight. This is weird. Do you have any idea or observed a problem like this? When I use another renderer in Processing, the captured VDMX-screen looks fine, but for some effects I really would like to use OPENGL in Processing. (I work on a MacBook Pro Mac OS 10.6.3, Processing 1.1.)
June 22nd, 2010 at 7:45 am
Hi Vade, I am wondering if you read my message and if you can reproduce the phenomenon or have any idea what I was talking about…
July 4th, 2010 at 6:32 am
Dear Vade,
unfortunately you did not response to my issue, yet. But I observed a funny thing just now: If I toggle on “Show_Capture_Area” in the VDMX layer controls, the output looks fine! YEAY, this solves my problem for now.
Still, it seems to be a bug you maybe would like to fix, though.
Best regards,
Grit.
July 4th, 2010 at 12:23 pm
I responded to you directly in an email, I guess you never got that.
July 8th, 2010 at 7:18 pm
any news to modul8?
July 8th, 2010 at 7:22 pm
Unfortunately, no news. Modul8 does not support Quartz Composer ‘natively’ which makes using 3rd party plugins problematic. Unfortunately the Kineme hack does not seem to work, last I tried. Make a request for native Quartz Composer support in Modul8, it would be great to have for everyone.
July 15th, 2010 at 7:28 am
Wow, no I didn’t get the email. I assume it must have gone directly into my spam folder. So I did not read it, unfortunately.
July 15th, 2010 at 7:32 am
Ah, I found the email in my spam now. It was still there. I will answer you via email now.