
LICEcap: Simple Animated Screen Captures - Tomte
https://www.cockos.com/licecap/
======
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.

~~~
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

~~~
XelNika
> MP4s aren’t as supported as GIFs.

That's barely true for H.264 and it is a much worse format in every other way.
Effective quality is higher with modern video formats because the lower data
rates afford higher resolutions and higher frame rates. Even the LICEcap demos
show that.

It's a neat tool, the user interface is really cool, but it would be better in
a different format.

~~~
jshier
This would be more true if sites like GitHub would allow uploading and
embedding of MP4 files where they allow GIFs. But that's not usually the case
unless you go through something Gyfy first.

~~~
XelNika
Fair, I was thinking more about device compatibility.

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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.

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

[1] [https://github.com/phw/peek](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/](https://www.maartenbaert.be/simplescreenrecorder/)

~~~
the_pwner224
I can second the SimpleScreenRecorder suggestion; it is amazing and feature-
rich yet still relatively straightforward to use.

For panning and zooming, you could try to use a screen magnifier such as KMag
and then have SSR record the KMag window?

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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".

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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](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

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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/](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

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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.

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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...](https://blog.statsbot.co/support-vector-machines-
tutorial-c1618e635e93) 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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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/](https://ezgif.com/)

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

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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](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.

~~~
beeskneecaps
This dual monitor capture bug was a pain point. Unhooking the monitor each
time I wanted to capture a non-blank gif wore me down.

------
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](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](https://github.com/tarkusdev/WebMCam)

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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](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](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](https://gifcap.dev)

~~~
joaomoreno
Plus, it's open source:
[https://github.com/joaomoreno/gifcap](https://github.com/joaomoreno/gifcap)

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bkanber
I really love LICEcap, I've been using it for years. It's a simple program
that does exactly what it advertises to do, no fluff.

------
trafnar
I haven’t seen any mention of what I think is the best gif screen recording
app, Claquette. It’s quite advanced and has built in cropping/trimming. The
exported GIFs are high quality and somehow magically quite small file size.

[https://www.peakstep.com/claquette/](https://www.peakstep.com/claquette/)

~~~
chrisked
Is it still maintained? The latest release notes are from 2018.

------
jtms
LICEcap is great software - we use it extensively on my team to share little
highlight reels of a given feature in pull requests

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nate
I used this constantly for things like making demo "videos". Great tool. The
only thing that drew me away was using a cloud based screen capture tool so
that after capture the gif/video was already being pushed to a url I could
share. It's wild how just saving me a step or two makes all the difference in
adoption of somthing.

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tyingq
Any idea why it's called LICEcap? Feel like I'm missing something obvious. I
get the cap part, but not the LICE.

~~~
hantusk
See [https://www.cockos.com/wdl/](https://www.cockos.com/wdl/)

LICE - Lightweight Image Compositing Engine. WDL is a small cross platform
library they have built to support the development of REAPER afaik

------
faeyanpiraat
Its an amazing tool to quickly record product feature demos for sales pages,
or visual aids for user support cases.

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danbolt
LICEcap is really nice for making itch.io covers. I'm a big fan of it!

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st0le
I recently found [https://gifcap.dev/](https://gifcap.dev/). Performance is
slow, but good to use if I can't install software on a machine.

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turnipla
The best part of LICEcap is that the result is often quite lightweight, even
though the color palette isn’t always the best.

Too bad it’s a little buggy on macOS (especially Catalina)

~~~
terramex
On macOS, I use GIPHY Capture - not open-source but free and works much better
than LICEcap.

edit: just noticed this comment
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22692523](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22692523)

~~~
turnipla
I’d rather not use yet another bloated Electron app. The bugs can be overcome
and the results are not affected

~~~
terramex
It is actually a native and fast Swift app and its only feature that can be
considered 'bloated' is instant upload to giphy.com (which I have never used).

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Multicomp
I used this for years until gifcam came out...now I use it whenever I'm on a
retired machine that does not have internet connection anymore

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tiborsaas
My only problem with this is that I can't get a high enough frame-rate.

Oh, anyone else noticed that it sometimes creates a 1px white line on an edge?

~~~
pixelbath
Yes, the frame rate seems to cap out at ~15-20 fps, and captured images really
don't play well with Discord in most cases. I usually open then re-export with
Gimp when posting to Discord, which isn't a great workflow.

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quangv
This still works for latest macOS? I tried it the other day and the record
button didn't do anything.

~~~
ndrake
Make sure you have the .gif extension on your filename. Fixed it for me on
Catalina. See
[https://github.com/justinfrankel/licecap/issues/71#issuecomm...](https://github.com/justinfrankel/licecap/issues/71#issuecomment-542028032)

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aantix
Is there any capture solution that will post directly to Slack? With
transcriptions?

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songshuu
LICEcap is a good bit of software. I also really enjoy OBS which allows for
narration.

------
runarberg
Is anybody else mildly annoyed by the proliferation of meaningful or
instructive gifs. Videos have been supported on by all major browsers for
almost a decade now. And videos are both smaller in size and provide better
interaction for viewers. Why are we still recording gifs?

~~~
jodrellblank
Nope, the opposite. Markdown + animated gif has been a great improvement in
the world in recent years. The Visual Studio Code release information pages
are an example:
[https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_43](https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_43)
\- this page with uBlock is about as good as the modern web gets. I don't love
how long it takes to load, but if they were videos I had to click to play,
that would be worse.

Video, video buffering, video with broken skipping, players blocked by ad
blockers, players that take ages to load and contact tons of sites,
autoplaying video, video which pops out to picture-in-picture and floats over
the content, video with adverts interrupting playback, video with overlays
interrupting the video, video which stalls midway through, video which breaks
if you leave it paused long enough for some session to timeout and it can't
resume, video which often re-downloads after skipping back to an already-
downloaded section, has been the opposite of a great improvement.

Twitter feeds in a browser where the videos auto-play as you scroll over them,
but play without sound so you have to mute your audio, unmute the video, then
restart it to catch whether you missed anything - but if you click wrong it
whisks you away to load that tweet in a new page and reloads everything
including the video muted again - are the worst of all worlds.

> _And videos are smaller in size_

Even as someone who whines a lot about efficiency and waste and bloaty
websites, this is still a time I'd rather say "if gif is too big, find a way
to make gif smaller, not replace them with a worse experience".

~~~
runarberg
Your comparison is unfair. Authors can make videos autoplay, play on scroll or
whatever. Authors don’t need to put ads or trackers in their videos, and there
is nothing stopping them from adding ads or trackers to a gif (replace the
source with an ad every couple of loops; in fact the 1px transparent gif is
the original tracker). Everything else you complained about can also be
present with gifs (except the picture-in-picture; which is simply not a
feature animated gifs).

Your twitter complaints for example is completely invalid, gifs cannot play
sound at all, nor can you start from beginning if you wanted to. In fact I
find it very frustrating to have to wait an entire loop to wait for an
instructional gif to start from scratch, with videos you can auto-play on
scroll, you can pause, you can rewind, etc.

Btw. your favorite vs-code website stalls in my browser, spins up my fan and
scrolls really sluggishly because of all the gifs.

~~~
jodrellblank
My complaints about what people actually do are unfair, because you can
imagine things being different? Load a page with a video which doesn't play
immediately and a gif which doesn't play immediately, and it's annoying for
both, then leave it for a bit and the gif will very likely load then loop so I
don't miss it when I look back, the video is as likely to play then autoplay
the next 'related' video so if I don't wait, I do miss it. Gifs tend to sit
inside a mobile page while loading, then play in-place ready to be scrolled
back to. Videos tend to fullscreen when played and _then_ have to be waited
for, or start playing tiny then have to be fullscreened and restarted to
watch. Gifs tend to scale with pinch-zoom, videos don't. It's not that the gif
file format mandates that they must loop, or that video codecs mandate
playlists, but that's what people actually do with them and all those things
together make videos a worse experience for anything which doesn't need to be
long form video.

Authors don't need to put ads in videos but they do. I have never seen a gif
say "an error occurred, try again later" when I try to unpause it, like
YouTube says several times each day for videos I paused yesterday. (inb4
"works on my machine"). Authors could replace gif frames with ads but they
generally don't, and haven't done so for years.

> _Your twitter complaints for example is completely invalid, gifs cannot play
> sound at all_

Excellent. This means I a) never miss something in the audio track, because
there isn't one. b) never have to take action unmute a gif. c) never have to
mute music and unmute a gif and rewind it just to find out if there is audio
to miss or not. d) Nobody ever says "don't forget to subscribe and hit that
notification bell, thanks from my Patreon sponsors like xxSwagMaster, buy my
merch and smash that like button" on a gif. This means gifs can't be a
replacement for all video, nor am I suggesting they should be; only saying I
prefer to err on the side of gif more than most people, because the experience
is generally less annoying (not completely annoyance-free).

> _I find it very frustrating to have to wait an entire loop to wait for an
> instructional gif to start from scratch_

Me too. It would be neat if right click -> reload image, restarted it, or if
there was a restart option in the right click menu.

> _with videos you can auto-play on scroll_

You can also be listening to a Twitter video, scroll it juuuust off screen,
and have Twitter decide you must have gone deaf as well and pause playing. You
can also no longer watch a YouTube video and lock your iPhone to keep the
audio playing, like you could a few iOS versions ago. This is nothing to do
with video codecs per-se, it's just part and parcel of video on the web and
the companies which control it and the things people do with it to grab
control and commercialise and overreach. Apparently nobody cares about gif
enough to do that kind of thing with it - or it's so limited, there are fewer
places to do that kind of thing.

> Btw. your favorite vs-code website stalls in my browser, spins up my fan and
> scrolls really sluggishly because of all the gifs.

"That thing you like, sucks" \- well, different things for different people.

------
sebastianconcpt
It's a must

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eeZah7Ux
There's ttygif for Linux that does the same.

