Quick-Start Guide¶
Freeseer is a free and open source screencasting application, primarily developed for capturing and streaming computer-aided presentations at conferences.
It’s been successfully used to capture presentations, demos, training material, and other videos. It’s capable of handling large conferences with many talks in various rooms.
With Freeseer, you can record video from external sources such as FireWire and USB (e.g. webcam or another computer’s screen via VGA output [1]).
Freeseer is written in Python, uses Qt4 for its GUI, and Gstreamer for video/audio processing. And it’s based on open standards so it supports royalty free audio and video codecs.
Read our history to find out why Freeseer was created.
Installing Freeseer from a package¶
Warning
You should only install Freeseer from a package if you plan to use it as an end-user. If you want to contribute to the project, do not install Freeseer from a package (if you already have, you’ll need to uninstall it). Instead, follow the instructions for installing Freeseer for development.
Arch Linux¶
Freeseer is available in AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/freeseer-git/
Or install with yaourt:
yaourt -S freeseer-git
Gentoo Linux¶
Freeseer is available in PaddyMac’s portage overlay: https://github.com/PaddyMac/overlay
After adding this overlay:
emerge -av freeseer
Installing Freeseer for Development¶
If you plan on contributing to Freeseer’s development, you’ll have to run Freeseer from source.
- Uninstall any previously installed instances of Freeseer
- Obtain the source code by forking and cloning the project
- Install the required dependencies
- Follow the below instructions for your operating system and use pip to install additional dependencies
Now you’re ready to run Freeseer from the command line. There are two ways to do this.
Run the Freeseer module as a script:
cd freeseer/src/ python -m freeseer
You’ll have to repeat these steps whenever you want to run Freeseer.
Install Freeseer in editable mode:
cd freeseer/src/ pip install -e .
After this one-time install, you can now run
freeseer
from anywhere.
Dependencies¶
- Git
- Python 2.7+
- sqlite3
- gstreamer0.10-python (pygst)
- PyQT development tools
Debian and Ubuntu Linux¶
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential git wget python2.7-dev python-gst0.10 python-gst0.10-dev \
qt4-qmake python-qt4 python-qt4-dev python-qt4-sql pyqt4-dev-tools libqt4-dev libqt4-sql libqt4-sql-sqlite \
gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-plugins-base gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio gstreamer0.10-alsa
Fedora Linux¶
sudo yum install git PyQt4-devel gstreamer-python sphinx python-sphinx
Warning
This list may be incomplete. Please let us know if you notice any missing packages.
Windows¶
Note
x86 version recommended whenever there is a choice.
- python 2.7.* x86
- setuptools-0.6c11.win32-py2.7
- GStreamer-WinBuilds-GPL-x86-Beta04-0.10.7
- GStreamer-WinBuilds-SDK-GPL-x86-Beta04-0.10.7
- If you encounter the error
"ImportError: DLL load failed"
when attempting to run freeseer, copy the contents of<GStreamer_dir>\<version>\sdk\bindings\python\v2.7\lib
to<GStreamer_dir>\<version>\lib
, and delete<GStreamer_dir>\<version>\lib\gstreamer-0.10\libgstpython-v2.6.dll
- If you encounter the error
- PyQt-Py2.7-x86-gpl-4.8.5-1
- PyGTK py2.7 all-in-one
- Windows 32-bit packages are recommended because pygtk-all-in-one package does not have a 64-bit installer.
- Add the following paths to your PATH variable :
`C:\Python27;C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\PyQt4\bin`
PyPI Packages¶
You’ll need to get some packages from the Python Package Index (PyPI).
You can install pip by securely downloading get-pip.py and executing it with administrator access:
wget -q https://raw.github.com/pypa/pip/master/contrib/get-pip.py -O- | sudo python
If you already have pip, first upgrade it to the latest version:
pip install --upgrade pip
Install the remaining packages. You may need administrator access.
On Linux:
pip install -Ur dev_requirements.txt
On Windows:
pip install -Ur windows_requirements.txt
Running Freeseer¶
Once you’ve installed Freeseer, you can run the various tools:
freeseer # Recording UI (default when no arguments supplied)
freeseer record # Recording UI
freeseer talk # Talk Editor UI
freeseer config # Configuration UI
You can view usage with the -h
or --help
option:
freeseer -h # General usage
freeseer record -h # Recording usage
freeseer talk -h # Talk Editor usage
freeseer config -h # Config usage
Note
If you’re going to hack on Freeseer, you’ll need to run it from source.
Go into the src/
directory and run it like:
python -m freeseer
python -m freeseer record
python -m freeseer talk
python -m freeseer config
IRC channel¶
Drop by our #freeseer channel on irc.freenode.net to chat with us.
Mailing list¶
We have a mailing list that’s also a discussion group.
http://groups.google.com/group/freeseer
Once you’ve joined the group, you can email subscribers at freeseer@googlegroups.com.
Authors¶
And many student contributors from Google Summer of Code, Fedora Summer Coding, and Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects.
Copyright and license¶
© 2011-2013 FOSSLC
Licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3 (GPLv3); you may not use this work except in compliance with the GPLv3.
You may obtain a copy of the GPLv3 in the LICENSE file, or at http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl.html.
Footnotes
[1] | Requires a VGA capture device, also known as a frame grabber. |