Steffen's Tech Blog

How to make screenshots and screencasts easily in Mac OS X?

2010-12-15T22:26:00.000+01:00

In Mac OS X you can take a screenshot of the complete screen by pressing Command-Shift-3 and a selection of the screen by pressing Command-Shift-4. This is usually sufficient enough, but if you try to use this key combination to capture a screenshot of a movie running in the Mac OS X DVD Player you will be surprised to find out that this doesn't work. The same is true for the built in Grab Application.

If you still want to do capture a picture from a DVD you could use the screen-capture shell utility in the Terminal application - as described in several webpages.

But if you would like something more convenient you could use an application such as Jing (http://www.techsmith.com/jing/). It allows you not only to take a picture even from a movie running in the DVD Player but also to make a short videos of the your screen and provides several options to edit, save and share this pictures and videos afterwards. There is a Free version available as well as a Pro version with more functionality.

7z files with Mac OS X

2010-05-01T11:28:00.000+02:00

I am a fan of the free open source format 7z (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7z) for data compression and encryption. With keka (http://www.kekaosx.com/en/) there is a nice, simple GUI application available for Mac OS X.

Create a Video DVD in Ubuntu 9.10 - the Karmic Koala

2010-01-26T21:08:00.000+01:00

Assuming you have created a video file that you want to burn to a video DVD in Ubuntu.

A nice and simple tool for this is DeVeDe - a program to create video DVDs and CDs (VCD, sVCD or CVD), suitables for home players, from any number of video files, in any of the formats supported by Mplayer.

After you have created the .iso dvd image with DeVeDe you can easily burn it to the DVD using Brasero.