Timed screencaps

[Kickstart]

Nothing ultra fancy here, but maybe some of you will find a use. Basically, I needed a script that would do timed captures of some Java applets in Netscape. It's more an interface to the 'import' utility of ImageMagick, but what the hey. After these images are created it's easy enough to use 'convert' on the command line to create an animated gif for use elsewhere.

An example usage: ./timed_import 320 240 30 200 1 30
...takes 30 caps at 1 second delay between each. The caps will be 320x240 and will be offset 30(x) and 200(y) from the top left of the screen.

Obviously, this is a Unix only solution and requires ImageMagick be installed.

Kickstart

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
 
use strict;
 
my $put_dir = '/home/user/screencaps/';
my ($topleftx, $toplefty, $width, $height, $delay, $num) = @ARGV;
my $captime = time();
my $count;
my $leave = 0;
 
# gonna be like this:
# import -window root -crop 300x200+200+200 foo.gif
unless ($topleftx && $toplefty && $width && $height && $delay && $num)
+ {
        $leave = 1;
        print <<'EOUSAGE'
Usage:
          ./timed_import <width> <height> <offset x> <offset y>
          <delay in seconds> <number of caps to take>
 
Filenames will be a UNIX timestamp set at script run followed by the n
+umber
of the capture (ie. 1000959520-3.jpg)
 
EOUSAGE
}
exit if $leave == 1;
 
my $cropvalues = $topleftx . 'x' . $toplefty . '+' . $width . '+' . $h
+eight;
 
$count = 1;
while ($count <= $num) {
        my $filename =  $captime . "-$count" . '.jpg';
        my $cmd = 'import -window root -crop ' . $cropvalues . ' ' . $
+put_dir . $filename;
        my $devnull = `$cmd`;
        sleep($delay);
        $count++;
}

Edit kudra, 2001-09-21 Replaced pre with code

Update Kickstart, 2001-10-29 Use 'convert' instead of 'animate' to make animated gifs of the screencaps with the ImageMagick utilities.