Show HN: Gifcap, a browser based client-side GIF screen recording tool (opens in new tab)

Author here. Added some cool features like trimming and cropping, to make it easier for you to nail on the particular area of your screen and keep the recording to a minimum. Let me know what you think!

This is really cool!

I love how simple and straightforward the UX is. It was instantly obvious how to use it, and it worked quickly and perfectly without any modals/banners/ads/whatever.

I think a single sentence somewhere on the page after you stop the recording telling you that you can crop by clicking and dragging, and you can trim by moving the little time markers might help with discovery.

I didn't realize you could do either of those things until I read your comment here.

I really loathe GIF for screen recordings: they are huge, they look terrible due to the 8-bit color pallet and low frame rate (in a desperate attempt to make them less huge), encoding is slow (in my experience at least, probably no hwenc available?) and they are expensive to render. There’s hardly any reason to use GIF when you can use a video instead — Imgur did exactly that with their GIFV which is just an H.264 video IIRC.

Unfortunately there are still many places where only images are allowed (e,g, GitHub README). HEIF is supposed to solve this problem but support is apparently abysmal.[1]

Anyone aware of any progress on a replacement of GIF?

[1] https://caniuse.com/#feat=heif

Very nice tool, but it would be great to be able to control the framerate, or the speed, or the number of frame. Because in my case, when I test, the gif is way too fast. It would be nice that it goes at least at the same speed as the real user. Thanks

Neat idea but it doesn't work for me. Not sure if it's because of my browsers (Brave Browser) or my operating system (Arch Linux) or because of my window manager (AwesomeWM). No matter if I select record entire window or one window, I end up with a GIF that has the right duration but it's only black.

This is good please set frame rate choice also add webm if you can

Nice UI; I really like the timeline view!

I would highly recommend adding .webm export (since Browser-based .webm encoding strongly correlates with the ScreenCapture API). If you'd like an example, you can reference my take on this: https://gifcorder.com/

There's also an Emscripten implementation of Gifsicle which you can use to reduce the size of the .gif (at the cost of color depth and encoding time).

This is awesome, thanks! I was looking for something like this just yesterday.

That said, the GIFs it outputs seem pretty huge in filesize. Have you considered other output formats?

Shameless plug. I did something similar. https://screenrecord.43z.one (no gif conversion though) but additionally it allows you to share you desktop recording via webrtc if you want.

I tried to keep the UI as simple and friendly as possible.

Very cool. Is there some kind of library so one can integrate this into one's own application easily?

Also, slightly related, Google Mail (and probably other products) has a "Report issue" feature, where I can take a screenshot of the current tab (and even crop it), is that in any way related (technology-wise)?

Pretty cool Joao, works fluent! Now for instruction videos where e.g. typing is involved, I'll prefer ScreenToGif still (e.g. because of frame speed and export options (webm, mp4), but if it's to record a video on screen or something quick, this works just as easy, if not easier.

Safari is a modern browser, but this doesn't work on it. Perhaps changing the description to the specific browsers supported(Chrome, Firefox, etc.) would be best?

ADDENDUM: Thought that maybe just detecting the browser is best, showing a notice that the tool doesn't work with it.

I seriously just was thinking I needed this to send some customer's some demos / examples of changes I'd made to web apps and etc... this is great.

That's neat!

I also didn't know about the cropping feature until I read other comments, I thought it didn't support cropping.

This is great! Thanks a lot.

licecap?

https://www.cockos.com/licecap/

Been around for about 10 years, from the guy who created Winamp.

I know it's not really "amazing" because lots of software allow you to record screen but it's great that you made it too damn simple. That said, a suggestion to consider webm because 5.6mb for 7secs isn't probably justifiable.

side note: if you're on windows, win+g is a great new tool for the same.