July 27, 2010 by Ivan Kristianto

[HowTo] Make Video Screen Capture On Ubuntu

If you want to promote your videos then you should give your video screen capture or snapshot to your customer. So they can see the quality of the videos and how the videos looks like before they buy it. In Windows you can use Windows Media Player classic to do so, you can refer to my post to see how to do that. In Ubuntu you can do so, but you doesn’t need a media player to capture it. You can make it from command line.

We are going to use mtn to make screen capture of your videos. Why mtn? Here are the reasons:
1. No GUI required
2. Simple to use
3. Very fast time of getting captures 0,5-5 seconds (on standard settings)

So here the steps to install it:
1. Open your terminal and update your repositories:

sudo apt-get update

2. Install this libraries:

sudo apt-get install -y libgd2 libavcodec libavformat libavutil libswscale

3. Download and unpack movie thumbnailer (mtn) binary:
http://rapidshare.com/files/344568205/mtn.rar
4. Give the mtn file execute permission:

chmod +x mtn

5. Alias it:

vim /home/[your_user_name]/.bashrc

add this line:

alias mtn='/[path to your mtn folder]/mtn'

6. Installation Done

How to use it:
1. Simple use:

mtn moviename.avi

2. If you got fonts error you can use this command:

mtn moviename.avi -f /var/lib/defoma/gs.d/dirs/fonts/VeraBd.ttf

Useful parameters:
-b 0.80 – will skip screen cap if 80% of screen is blank
-c x – use number instead of x, that’s number of columns
-j 90 – jpeg quality in %
-r x – number of rows same as columns
-T text – addtext above output image

For more option please checkout the mtn page here.

see the example:

Download for Windows also available

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Article by Ivan Kristianto

Ivan Kristianto is a profesional web developer and blogger. Very interest with free and open source software. Follow my Twitter: @ivankrisdotcom or Facebook profile IvanKristiantoBlog or Email me at ivan@ivankristianto.com

Category: Ubuntu
Tags: how to, linux, screen capture, ubuntu