Looking for a solid piece of desktop capture software

[Mythricia]

Hais

First off I'm not being lazy here, I've tried a lot of googling and looking around but I just can't find anything that isn't useless, 10 years old, or doesn't quite fit the bill - so I'm asking here!


I'm looking for some kind of program to perform one very simple task; taking a screenshot of the desktop every X seconds. Probably something like every 1 seconds is what I'll be using. I have Fraps, even a paid version, but obviously even recording at 1 FPS or whatever, the .avi files end up astronomically huge compared to a simple .jpg screenshot every 1 second going into a folder. Plus, Fraps is glitchy when recording the Aero desktop, simply because Windows doesn't update the desktop at all unless something is actively happening, sometimes it doesn't even update on mouse movement. This makes Fraps recording of the desktop really unreliable and really ugly - large skips in the recording when Aero doesn't update (because I'm idle for 2-3 seconds or whatever). The same applies to Fraps repeated screenshot ability, by the way.

So that rules out Fraps, which is a shame, I even paid for the thing back in the day.


Most other screen capture software is so dumbed down and user-friendly its nauseating, not to mention most of them offer very limited options, if any at all, and only record like 1/2 resolution or something silly like that.


Basically, all I'm asking for is;

• Ability to screen cap with a fixed interval (1 sec, 5 sec, 10 sec, whatevs)
• Saves full resolution .jpg, the material won't be upscaled or scrutinized closely so any other format is a waste of space.
• Able to do this non-stop until told to stop, preferably saving things to a folder I specify as it goes along.
• Doesn't clutter the screen with ads or watermarks... I'm hardly willing to pay 100$ for something that should take a programmer 5 minutes to make.

Why? Well, I'm time-lapsing me working on something on my computer, and that's basically it. I swap between a lot of software so I the best solution was to capture the entire desktop. Video capture isn't an option, too huge, and entirely pointless anyway; I only need a frame every second or so.

Anyone?

[Deleted]

I know you said video capture isnt an option because the files are too large but try Xsplit's local record function. The files are FLV and are tiny compared to anything else i've used to record. If thats defo not an option for you, i dont have a clue.

[BicycleMafioso]

Well. You could either do it through editting - extracting only one image per X seconds - or setting up a looping macro/script.

[Mythricia]

Extracting video frames is easy enough, but that doesn't solve the problem of me having 7-8 hours (potentially a lot more) of fraps footage (or whatever footage) on my drives... Not very gigabyte-economcal compared to just having single .jpg's. sure it'll take a lot of space eventually with jpg's too but not anywhere near the raw data most video contains per frame.


The more convoluted the whole process gets the less likely it is that I'll even bother, that's the reason I'm looking for software to do it for me. Hitting a button to resume / start the time-lapse when I sit down to work on this project, and then hitting a button again to pause/stop it while I do something else etc...