Screen Mimic 1.5 released! Now a Universal Binary!
June 14th, 2006Finally after months of muttering about byte order problems under my breath, Screen Mimic 1.5 has been released!
There are several new features in this version which I am pretty happy with:
- Screen Mimic is now a Universal Binary
This is the feature that was the main goal in this relase, and also the feature that took the longest. Flash files use little-endian byte order on every platform. So in the original release, I speant a fair amount of time converting from big-endian (powerPC) format to little-endian.
So for the Universal Binary I had to first determine which platform the application was running on, (which was pretty easy thanks to the NSHostByteOrder function), and then do some dynamic switching.
The tricky part (and the part that took the longest), was in making sure that the byte order of the image data was correct. This is compounded by the fact that Flash and Quicktime require different pixel color orders. But all that is now just a happy memory.
- Encoding Optimization (i.e. files encode MUCH faster now)
This actually was an accident, I was doing some testing of the aforementioned byte order issues and realized that I had a fairly lengthy (lengthy in a big “O” efficiency sort of way) section of code that was completley unnecessary, I took this out and encoding sped up dramatically.
I mean, I was really studying image processing algorithms and optimized the uh… ok so it was an accident, but I’m calling it a new feature anyway.
- Multiple Quicktime Formats Are Now Possible
You can now choose between MPEG-4, H.263 (the encoding that iChat AV uses), Sorensen-3, and the ultra-cool and efficient H.264.
In my (rather unscientific) testing of the different formats, H.264 not only produced significantly better quality files, but the file size was also half of the next runner up (Sorensen-3).
So why are you still reading this? Go and download it already! : )
Hi, I’m very interested in Screen Mimic, does it sync-record audio while recording your desktop?
That is the main feature that we are targeting for the 2.0 release. You can save the recording to FLV format, record the audio separately, and then dub it together using Macromedia Flash MX or higher.
Hi!
I was searching for an application to record World of Warcraft (the famous game made my Blizzard). Screen Mimic seemed to be able to record it quite good. The thing is that I didn’t really have the time to switch it to full-screen before the 15 second demo ran out, so I didn’t see how it affected the performance of my WoW-play. The game takes about 5-7 second to load when switching to full screen. Would it somehow be possible of trying a 30 second demo? I would most certainly buy it if I knew that it works well.
Has anyone else tried capturing WoW with Screen Mimic?
Franz,
Other people have tried and confirmed that it worked. While we don’t offer 30 second demos, if you purchase the software and find that it does not work as expected, you can request a refund.
[...] Since releasing Screen Mimic as a Universal Binary I have had a lot of great customer feedback. [...]
[...] Despite all of these headaches, Screen Mimic 1.5, the universal binary version, was released in June of 2006. This took a considerable amount of time (5 months), for a number of reasons. The main reason being that I had started going to graduate school full time, and so I was back to nights and weekends coding. (It sounds a lot like a cell-phone plan, you can code all you want for free on nights and weekends…). Screen Mimic 1.5 was also a free upgrade (or cross-grade as some people liked to say during the Intel transition period). [...]