[gst-devel] ScreenKast integration, away from ffmpeg

[Bram Biesbrouck]

Hi all,

I'll introduce myself first; I'm Bram Biesbrouck, creator of ScreenKast and 
captorials.com . I joined the gstreamer list to search for 
community-developers that want to cooperate in the ScreenKast development. 
ScreenKast is a (fairly new) screen-recording program for Linux that provides 
functionality to record your desktop, edit that recording and publish it to 
captorials.com. In addition, it offers the possibility to export to some 
common video-formats. More info regarding the software can be found here:
http://captorials.com/index.php?cmd=software

Today, the latest stable release is 0.1.2, and uses ffmpeg to export the video 
stream to all supported file formats. However, I'm far from satisfied with 
ffmpeg (performance is not very good, API is difficult and documentation is a 
hell) and I would like to switch to GStreamer instead.

Basically, this is what I'm looking for:
ScreenKast produces a stream of rectangle-updates that tell the canvas what 
region-changes happen and when they change (those familiar with VNC/RFB will 
recognise this). I want to build a pipeline that reads pixel-rectangles from 
a memory-buffer, encodes the canvas-pixels (or preferrably just the changed 
rectangle-region) and exports them to a file on disk, creating a video file.

Since things are very busy at the moment, all help that will get me 
jumpstarted is welcome. Moreover, if some individuals would be interested in 
joining the development of ScreenKast/libinstrudeo (libinstrudeo is the 
backend library), that's great too; I'll be adding video-editing 
functionality to ScreenKast soon, after the export-routines are re-written.

Please tell me what you think.

Bram