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authorKristian Høgsberg <krh@bitplanet.net>2012-05-29 11:36:27 -0400
committerKristian Høgsberg <krh@bitplanet.net>2012-05-29 11:36:27 -0400
commitdb0623a5f054324b27aa9cf40474aa9f283e6723 (patch)
treeef4e49e77d8d696f440cf782f737b04d9959ee85 /wcap/README
parentf40d5d893f0c1750753a11b5e1c86af4f6a4cc9a (diff)
wcap: Add wcap README, with a bit of documentation
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+WCAP Tools
+
+WCAP is the video capture format used by Weston (Weston CAPture).
+It's a simple, lossless format, that encodes the difference between
+frames as run-length ecoded rectangles. It's a variable framerate
+format, that only records new frames along with a timestamp when
+something actually changes.
+
+Recording in Weston is started by pressing MOD+R and stopped by
+pressing MOD+R again. Currently this leaves a capture.wcap file in
+the cwd of the weston process. The file format is documented below
+and Weston comes with two tools to convert the wcap file into
+something more usable:
+
+ - wcap-snapshot; a simple tool that will extract a given frame from
+ the capture as a png. This will produce a lossless screenshot,
+ which is useful if you're trying to screenshot a brief glitch or
+ something like that that's hard to capture with the screenshot tool.
+
+ wcap-snapshot takes a wcap file as its first argument. Without
+ anything else, it will show the screen size and number of frames in
+ the file. With an integer second argument, it will extract that
+ frame as a png:
+
+ [krh@minato weston]$ wcap-snapshot capture.wcap
+ wcap file: size 1024x640, 176 frames
+ [krh@minato weston]$ wcap-snapshot capture.wcap 20
+ wrote wcap-frame-20.png
+ wcap file: size 1024x640, 176 frames
+
+ - wcap-decode; this is a copy of the vpxenc tool from the libvpx
+ repository, with wcap input file support added. The tool can
+ encode a wcap file into a webm video (http://www.webmproject.org/).
+ The command line arguments are identical to what the vpxenc tool
+ takes and wcap-decode will print them if run without any arguments.
+
+ The minimal command line requires a webm output file and a wcap
+ input file:
+
+ [krh@minato weston]$ wcap-decode -o foo.webm capture.wcap
+
+ but it's possible to select target bitrate and output framerate and
+ it's typically useful to pass -t 4 to let the tool use multiple
+ threads:
+
+ [krh@minato weston]$ wcap-decode --target-bitrate=1024 \
+ --best -t 4 -o foo.webm capture.wcap --fps=10/1
+
+
+WCAP File format
+
+The file format has a small header and then just consists of the
+indivial frames. The header is
+
+ uint32_t magic
+ uint32_t format
+ uint32_t width
+ uint32_t height
+
+all CPU endian 32 bit words. The magic number is
+
+ #define WCAP_HEADER_MAGIC 0x57434150
+
+and makes it easy to recognize a wcap file and verify that it's the
+right endian. There are four supported pixel formats:
+
+ #define WCAP_FORMAT_XRGB8888 0x34325258
+ #define WCAP_FORMAT_XBGR8888 0x34324258
+ #define WCAP_FORMAT_RGBX8888 0x34325852
+ #define WCAP_FORMAT_BGRX8888 0x34325842
+
+Each frame has a header:
+
+ uint32_t msecs
+ uint32_t nrects
+
+which specifies a timestamp in ms and the number of rectangles that
+changed since previous frame. The timestamps are typically just a raw
+system timestamp and the first frame doesn't start from 0ms.
+
+A frame consists of a list of rectangles, each of which represents the
+component-wise different between the previous frame and the current
+using a run-length encoding. The initial frame is decoded against a
+previous frame of all 0x00000000 pixels. Each rectangle starts out
+with
+
+ int32_t x1
+ int32_t y1
+ int32_t x2
+ int32_t y2
+
+followed by (x2 - x1) * (y2 - y1) pixels, run-length encoded. The
+run-length encoding uses the 'X' channel in the pixel format to encode
+the length of the run. That is for WCAP_FORMAT_XRGB8888, for example,
+the length of the run is in the upper 8 bits. For X values 0-0xdf,
+the length is X + 1, for X above or equal to 0xe0, the run length is 1
+<< (X - 0xe0 + 7). That is, a pixel value of 0xe3000100, means that
+the next 1024 pixels differ by RGB(0x00, 0x01, 0x00) from the previous
+pixels.