stevenhoving/camstudio

CamStudio fork

CamStudio

The fork

This is a personal fork of the camstudio source code found in the mecurial repository on sourceforge.net. I have forked this project because:

• The installers that are availible on the web are not kosher.
• No h264/mkv support out of the box.
• Flash based products are insecure, support must be removed.

Goals

Besides creating a clean installer for camstudio I have found myself a couple of additional goals.

• Fix memory leaks - done.
• Remove unmaintainable features:
  • swf support - removed.
  • xnote support - removed.
• Upgrade/Remove project dependencies:
  • CxImage - removed.
  • zlib - done.
  • minilzo - done.
  • libconfig++ - removed.
  • libpng - removed.
• Replace static visual studio project files with CMake - done.
• Add support for mkv - done.
• Replace libconfig with alternative - done.
• Improve settings screen - done.
• Create release - done.
• Introduce unit test - in progress.
• Replace UI framework with Qt.

Removed features

• swf support.
• xnote support.
• audio recording support (re-implement audio recording is planned)

How to clone/build

1. git clone https://github.com/stevenhoving/camstudio.git --recursive
2. bootstrap.cmd
3. Now open the project in the vs_build directory and build it.

The source forge project

https://sourceforge.net/p/camstudio

Dependencies

State	Name	Project
Official	minilzo	http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo
Official	zlib	https://github.com/madler/zlib
Official	ffmpeg	https://www.ffmpeg.org
Official	cpptoml	https://github.com/skystrife/cpptoml
Official	fmtlib	https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt
Official	Aeon Cmake	https://github.com/aeon-engine/libaeon-cmake
Official	Google Test	https://github.com/google/googletest
Official	Google Benchmark	https://github.com/google/benchmark

Credits

A big thanks goes out to the original CamStudio developers. And to bestlily who had a initial port of CamStudio (https://github.com/bestlily/Camstudio), thanks.

camstudio's Issues

Are these installers free of malware?

Just verifying for a friend… CamStudio has had a history of using the infamous installcore malware. I just wanted to make sure it’s safe for them to install.

Reevaluate recording mouse position

Currently the position of the mouse is always recorded. If configured that you dont need the mouse cursor in the output file then this data gets disregarded. As i have experienced, recording mouse position while debugging is really slowing everything down. So also look at its performance.

Add commandline mode to recorder

For CamStudio v3 the command line utility was removed. This was because reworking the existing utility would postpone the release even further.
It is the intention to bring this functionality back. Options:

• incorporate a command line mode into the main CamStudio recorder executable (a bit harder because of the use of MFC).
• move all the recording logic to a separate library and write a new command line utility that uses it.

No audio recorded

No matter what combination of settings I try, I cannot get CS3A4 to record audio. I am using Windows 10. Please help!

Remove swf support

There is no place for flash based products on the web. It has a reputation of being insecure. So then the best thing to do is to remove it.

Fix legacy (sourceforge) bugs

See https://sourceforge.net/p/camstudio/bugs/

• 11. 256 color ( 8 bits ) is not supported
  Is 16 bit colors supported?
• 71. Slow frame rate, will be fixed by
  Will be fixed by #17
• 76. fixed region with left < 0, multi monitor

configuring custom region size is ignored the first time.

configuring custom region size is ignored the first time.
the second time it is applied.

Crash when stopping recording by doing an exit in the left bottom notification area

When stopping an ongoing recording by clicking exit on the notification area in the left bottom of the screen results in a crash.
The workaround is to first stop the recording by selecting stop in the left bottom notification area and then do an exit.

cleanup global variables

The entire code base is riddled with global variable to keep track of 'state'.

• Add g_ prefix all the global's.
• Move globals into structs and create a single runtime model to store them.

Portable version of CamStudio

It would be great to have a portable version of CamStudio

Building on windows 7 broken due to permissive- being incompatible with the win7 sdk

The future for this CamStudio fork

First of all: Thank you for creating this fork! As a happy user of CamStudio for many years, I have considered many times to create a fork - or to help in the development which seems to have stalled completely. It seems you have done a lot of good work already :-)

I have some questions that you hopefully have time to answer:

1. How motivated are you about this project? Are you considering the work mostly done, or are you interested in getting other people involved? In other words, is it an option to make this more official - to use "GitHub Team for Open Source" - to avoid the forks of forks problem ...
2. Did you contact Nick - the person behind camstudio.org and the SF project - about taking over the project and the domain? I know Camstudio has a bad reputation because of the downloads from camstudio.org, and I just hate those "driver" ads, so I am unsure about Nick's motivation ...
3. I assume your version 3 has nothing to do with the version 3 that was mentioned back in 2010 ;-)
4. If making this the official Camstudio is no option, have you considered rebranding it?
5. Did you look at the competition - ShareX and others - before starting the work on this fork? If so, I would like to know what made you spend time on Camstudio? I don't know ShareX, but to me it seems bloated - I need just a screen recorder.

Anyway, the biggest problem is that your fork is hard to find. After verifying that your fork is as great as it seems, I will edit the Wikipedia article - which is a start.

Fix memory leaks

Throughout the code base cppcheck has identified a large number of memory leaks.

Rewrite settings system

• replace the old libconfig + binary ini application settings with just a normal ini (like) settings system.
  • capture settings
  • application settings.
  • hotkey settings.

Camstudio (latest alpha) Crash on Region Record

Installed latest Alpha release on Windows 10 (latest build). Tried to record using Region with the ff settings:

Codec - Camstudio
Container - mp4
Framerate - 24
Encoder tune - Animation
All else are default.

. Expected the region selector to appear; instead screen became momentarily laggy then Camstudio crashed.

Was able to record using Fixed Region instead. File saved to selected directory.

Refactor video encoding (Add support for mkv)

Currently there is only seems to be a avi muxer. Conversions to other formats would be done by a external converter. If the comments in the avi muxer implementation are still relevant then it has a limit for 4gb files.

• Pull in ffmpeg dependecy.
• write video codec wrapper.
• write format (muxer) wrapper.
• write ffmpeg camcodec encoder.
• update ui.

Mp4/MKV container format does not support camcodec.

Currently it is possible to select incompatible video settings (camcodec and mp4).
(edit)
MKV also does not seem to work.

Add support for Intel QSV (quick sync video)

ffmpeg has support for intel qsv, it just requires a different way of setting up the video encoder.

Mouse clicks (visualized with red/blue circles) in created video are not removed

When a click is done the video show a red circle (for left click) and blue (for right click).
The expected behavior should be that the circle should be visible for a specified time and then it should be removed but in the video this is not what is observed.
What is seen is that clicks are done and the red circle does not disappear.

Button state rendering sometimes does not pickup mouse button up event.

This problem was identified during an UI test run in a vm test environment.
Todo:

• investigate the cause.

Enable yuvconvert rgb2yuv conversion.

During testing for 3.0 alpha 1 image quality was not up to par. For 3.0 we fall back to ffmeg conversion code.

Replace use of deprecated codecvt

One of the bolder moves of the cpp committee was to deprecate codecvt for C++17. My idea how to fix this is to actually resolve this differently.
Proposal:
Keep everything in std::string using utf8 encoding, and only convert to unicode (convert std::wstring) when actually use it.

Reimplement pause recording

Video quality slider behaves incorrect (reverse)

Currently the video quality slider does not behave correct. In fact when you set it to max quality you get the lowest quality.

git history rewrite

The 3 project directories (CamStudio, CamStudio2.7 and CamStudio2.7_DShow) could best to be perceived as development branches. Where CamStudio holds the 2.6 stable, CamStudio2.7 hold the 2.7 stable and CamStudio2.7_DShow a development branch as it seems.
So why don't we just split those into separate branches.

Milestone v3 alpha 5

List of tasks before we can release a new alpha:

• fix record window (currently causes crashes or records invalid data or invalid part of the display).
• verify multi display rect recording (record section of display 1 and a section of display 2).
• integrate msvc runtime installer into installer.

Enable support for h264 high444 profile.

Currently we are converting our captured frames feom bgr to yuv420. X264 also supports yuv444. Which will improve video quality.

restore deploy resource files

When cleaning up the repository I accidentally removed the deploy resource files.

• CamCodec.ini
• Other...

Add unit tests for critical path code

Add unit tests for critical path code. This includes refactoring to allow unit tests in code that is used to do the recording.

Pause of video gives unexpected behavior (paused time part of end result)

Pausing while capturing gives a strange end-result.
When playing back the video the actual time paused is also shown in the video. The video just shows the last image before pausing. When the actual pause time expired it continues playing the video from there on. Example: Created video and paused after 47 seconds for 16 seconds. Result at 0:47 is show the last image recorded and after 16 seconds at 1:03 it continues playback.

Expected behavior: When pausing the capture it should also skip the pause in the resulting video

Which version of Visual Studio should I use?

So this is really not an issue. But I want to know which version of Visual Studio can I use to be able to work on this code? I want to know answers before I am going to test one. Cause maybe, you know, I don't want to spend $$ for a hobby project.

It will be really cool if anyone can answer me. Thanks!

Installer does not contain visual studio 2017 redistributable, causing start-up errors (3.0-alpha.1).

Hello. Tried to run the 3.0-alpha.1 release on Windows 10 x64 and I keep getting the following errors:

mfc140u.dll - missing
vcruntime140.dll - missing
msvcp140.dll - missing

https://imgur.com/a/sqa2GjR

edit: solved by installing Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable Update 3 RC from Microsoft.

Refactor audio recording and file muxing

Currently it seems that audio gets merged in the output as a post process step. Refactor this so we can record video and audio in the same file.

This is somewhat linked with the mkv muxer task.

Refactor audio capture and encoding

Spin off issue of #5.

• write audio capture system.
• write audio codec wrapper.
• integrate into codec system.
• ui updates.

Replace UI framework with Qt.

I'm not saying mfc is bad... I just like qt.

Improve settings screen.

This application setting idea is just a mess. Lets attempt to create order into chaos.

Feature Request: Option to Run on Windows start

Filing request to add option to run Camstudio on Windows startup. Currently this feature is not found in the latest alpha.

Selecting Fixed Region causes crash

Running on windows 10 1809 with all the latest updates. Fresh install, when selecting an fixed region to record, then pressing the record button, Camstudio pauses, then crashes. If i press record without trying to set a selection or area( or any preset recording option ), it will record.

I tried to run as administrator, no change. Video card is an Nvidia GeForce GT 620.

Didnt see a log file, but might be looking in the wrong place. Be happy to attach it though.

.

Implement Desktop Duplication

The Desktop Duplication api has been added to Windows 8.
This will possibly solve any performance issues on windows 8 and higher.

Create installer + ci

The old installer script is outdated, create a new one and integrate ci.

CamStudio crashes with option 'Region -> Select Screen'

Installed: CamStudio Recorder v2.7.4
Happens after selecting 1 of 3 Monitors/Screens.
No problems with other region options.

Upgrade project dependencies

Upgrade project dependencies, i'm not going to elaborate why and how here.

• minilzo 2.10 updated
• tinyxml removed
• CxImage update or replace.
• libconfig update or replace.
• libpng.
• zlib.
• minilzo.

Region selection is broken on systems with multiple monitors

The screen gets squashed to the left (black bar on the right) and the selection doesn't work at all, probably due to mouse cursor positions not being correct.

Crash when using shortcuts to start/stop a recording

When I want to start a recording by pressing F7, Camstudio exits without any message. If I use the GUI button (or the system tray icon), the recordings starts without a problem.

The same problem occurs when I want to stop a recording with F8. Only using the GUI button or the system tray icon works without a crash.

I tested version 3.0 Alpha 2 on Windows 10 1809 x64.