Recently I found a new software project for capturing high quality videos from the Linux Desktop that works perfectly with the Second Life client.

yukon plugs directly into the OpenGL system. It replaces the system libGL with a wrapper. All you do is compile and install the software and configure a Hotkey in the config file (the default F8 is already used in SL, so I chose the “Pause” key.). Now you can simply run the SL client with the yukon wrapper:

yukon secondlife

Thats about it. As long as you don’t start capturing the application window, the wrapper doesn’t create any load. (Our Scripter tx Oh told me that he even configured yukon as a $LL_WRAPPER in the startup script. That way you have it accessible on standby anytime you need.) And even when you start capturing, the load is much less than I ever saw, be it Fraps on Windows, the normal “Record Video” menu entry, used on a Macintosh, or xvidcaps on a Linux box.

As long as I keep the size of my SL window at 800×600 (which is just perfect for videos, please keep it real!), I don’t recognize any increased load, even with the capturing running,. (That’s on a AMD x2 4600+.)

Yukon doesn’t waste too much time compressing the running stream, for a 4 minute test video with 800×650 pixel I found a whopping 2.4GByte of raw data in my tmp folder. You can watch this file directly with the seom-player, or pipe it to mplayer to watch it in full quality. But hey, only my closest friends would download 2Gigs and a half for a simple SL video…

So the next step is to compress the video into a neat video format, perfect for streaming, supported by all modern players: MP4 Ogg/Theora

Just call:

seom-filter finestream.seom | ffmpeg2theora -f yuv2mpeg2 \

-v 8 --optimize - -o readyforweb.ogg

# please notice the linebreak

The default quality of 5/10 produced a 10MByte video better that most things you see on ***tube, but since I had some text stuff in the video, I opted for a quality of 8. 30MByte. Believe me, you’ll reach much more good friends with that size.

Here’s the result, with some music added:

Torrids Testvideo

Oh, you don’t absolutely have to switch to linux to watch that (allthough that’s of course the best solution on a long scale^^): Here’s a quicktime plugin for all you Mackies and Windozers. (thanks, tx!). And the best thing: Once you’ve installed it, you can even see Theora videos in Second Life. And I bet there’ll be some soon…^^

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