LICEcap: Simple Animated Screen Captures

[robin_reala]

From macOS Catalina on, there’s a new screen capture mode under cmd + shift + 5, that includes mp4 recording capture. That’s replaced most of my previous Giphy Capture use.

[mstade]

Additionally you can use gifski[1] to convert clips to gifs. I don’t know if it’s the most efficient (quality/space wise) tool out there but it’s dead simple to use, and combined with the built in screen capture tools in macOS it makes for a really fast workflow to capture, edit and convert clips.

(No affiliation, just a happy customer.)

[1]: https://sindresorhus.com/gifski

[dbg31415]

For Mac Users...

Apple + Shift + 4, then hit Space and you can capture screenshots of specific Windows.

(This has been around forever, but easy to come across people who didn't know about it.)

[turnipla]

MP4s aren’t as supported as GIFs. Even if you convert them they’ll be heavier than LICEcap’s results because of the MPEG compression artifacts

[ebg13]

This was introduced in Mojave, not Catalina.

[geerlingguy]

TIL, thanks! The one good thing about LICEcap is you can position the box over anything and record just a small area. Can you use option with cmd + shift + 5 or any other modifier to just choose one part of the screen?

It probably won't replace iShowU or OBS for all the features I sometimes need, but a quick screengrab video would be nice now and then.

[tomhallett]

I didn't know osx could do screen recordings like that (without having to open quicktime). +1

But... I will still use LICEcap for github pull requests, because github rejected the video I made with osx (file type? size?)

[junkblocker]

I believe it is mov instead of mp4. mp4 would be great since it takes much much less space.

[diablo1]

I remember I accidentally left Licecap running for about 6 hours and it just generated this massive unoptimized binary blob of raw screen grabs on my disk. Generated a file so large that Windows was complaining it had no space left to do vital things like allocate memory to swap and other tasks.

[melicerte]

For a Linux alternative (which is not supported by LICEcap), I recommend Peek[1].

[1] https://github.com/phw/peek

[yunusabd]

This one [1] works well for me on Linux, it allows exporting to many different formats. You can even make the recording rectangle follow your cursor, works well with multiple screens too.

Still looking for something that allows panning and zooming while recording, on Linux or Windows.

[1] https://www.maartenbaert.be/simplescreenrecorder/

[sime2009]

LICEcap also works quite well on Linux via Wine.

[tomstuart]

This is such a great tool which deserves a wider audience. I honestly think that more people would hear about it & use it if it had a less unappealing name.

[cactus2093]

Agree, every time I recommend it to someone I feel the need to qualify it with "the name is really weird, but trust me it's a great tool". It would be hard to come up with anything that is more random/irrelevant to the functionality, and also more off-putting than "lice".

[dr_kiszonka]

On Windows, I use ShareX[1], which is free, open-source, lightweight, and has tons of useful features. I love it!

There used to be an issue with ShareX where, by default, it uploaded screenshots and recordings to free online sharing sites, so that you could quickly share links to your files with others. I am not sure if this is still the case, but if you want to give ShareX a try and don't want your files online, make sure to disable this option.

1. https://getsharex.com

[tenryuu]

While somewhat the default, there is a prompt on the first capture if you would like to upload it. Selecting No will be remembered until toggled manually in the user settings

[mhanberg]

I love LICEcap. I would use the built in video capture from macOS, but LICEcap produces files that are much smaller.

The quality isn't as good, but most gifs I am producing are meant to be viewed in slack or iMessage where the quality is not super important.

[7839284023]

For Windows you can use ScreenToGif (https://www.screentogif.com/), which does exactly the same thing + you can edit your GIF afterwards.

[phreack]

This one's my favorite, use it all the time at work. It even downloaded ffmpeg for me, which was a nice bonus, and is easily portable

[jaclaz]

It is one of the best little tools around AFAICT.

The Windows version "installer" can be opened with 7-zip and double clicking on \licecap128-install.exe\licecap-exe (155877 bytes) the program works just fine from within the archive.

[abhgh]

Convenient to use and very helpful for technical illustrations. For ex, I created the gifs here [1] using LICEcap - showing a class boundary in 3D space. Have been using it at work for a couple of years now.

[1] https://blog.statsbot.co/support-vector-machines-tutorial-c1... sorry, couldn't find a gif to directly link to. If you don't want to scroll, ctrl+F for the text "This is what the projected data looks like". There are two consecutive gifs, then a static image, and then another gif after that.

[throw1234651234]

I have been using this for 5 years now. Great for demos, bug report, etc. Super light weight. Everyone I recommend it to loves it.

[donquichotte]

Cockos is the company that also develops Reaper, which is probably the best audio production software out there.

[bluedino]

Which is Justin Frankel of Winamp fame

[prepend]

This is a really useful tool and I had been using it for quite a while before I learned that Cockos is the new name of Justin Frankel’s company. He who made Winamp and Gnutella.

[whitehouse3]

And Reaper! The best DAW for music and podcast production because it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. I didn’t realize all these were made by the same company.

[zubspace]

LICEcap is great. Unfortunately I always need or want to edit the gifs afterwards.

That's where ezgif [1] comes into play. I'm usually not a fan of web apps, but ezgif works well and I never found a offline gif editor that capable. It's amazing how hard you can optimize a gif if you can live with less frames or a few artifacts.

[1] https://ezgif.com/

[gioerr]

With LICEcap you can always record to .lcf and edit with REAPER then you render to GIF.

[joeblau]

I used to use LICEcap, but for some reason it was failing me (I don’t remember what). I went on a journey (through 10 Mac gif makers) to find the “best” gif maker and I settled on GIF Brewery[1] and I’ve never looked back.

[1] - https://gfycat.com/gifbrewery

[noman-land]

I've had trouble doing captures on a second monitor; the gifs turn out all black. I always move my items to my laptop monitor before capturing and that does the trick.

[tylerchilds]

It's a known issue, the work around is to manually add .gif when prompted before recording starts.

[koirapoika]

For Windows ScreenToGif seems to be one of the best due to a small footprint and features available.

On Mac I was using LICECap as well, but wasn't too satisfied with the blurry picture, color palette and low frame rate, although it's still good if needed urgently.

Trying to find something else I bumped into Kap[1] with mp4, gif and webm format exporting, also simple trimming is included. I'm not that happy to know that it's an Electron-based app, but that's the price. Apart from that the size of webm files is even smaller than mp4 and browser support is pretty good these days.

[1] https://github.com/wulkano/kap

[ljp_206]

Back when I was just a wee tike hoping I could record my screen to make machinima or perhaps even Runescape videos, screen recording was the holy grail of cool tools that were hard to access or nowhere near accessible. I'm talking Camtasia, that sort of thing. It seems like a very obvious result of the level of technology we have at our disposal now but it still warms my heart that there are so many ways to freely and virtually tap friends and strangers on the shoulder and show them what's happening on our screen.

[the8472]

Here's a similar one that does webm, mp4 and gif https://github.com/tarkusdev/WebMCam

[arciini]

One tip - for UI based Pull Requests/Merge Requests, consider attaching a LICEcap GIF of the before and after if you don't have any screenshot testing set up.

I work on a pretty front-end-intensive app (https://wanderlog.com) and it makes code reviews way easier, as you can see the change in context.

The gifs occasionally can go over the 10 MB cap that Gitlab allows, and in those cases I do a quick re-encode using Handbrake to a mp4 video.

[runarberg]

I really wished github would allow mp4 videos in the pull-request/issue threads. Getting a capture of the bug makes things easy. Being able to control the playback of the demo would be even better.

[dang]

A bit from 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8695308

[joaomoreno]

You should also give gifcap[1] a try. It's cross platform, browser based, client side only, with a preview editor which allows you to trim and crop the recording.

[1] https://gifcap.dev

[joaomoreno]

Plus, it's open source: https://github.com/joaomoreno/gifcap