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Comment by robin_reala | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Additionally you can use gifski[1] to convert clips to gifs. I don’t know if it’s the most efficient (quality/space wise) tool out there but it’s dead simple to use, and combined with the built in screen capture tools in macOS it makes for a really fast workflow to capture, edit and convert clips.

(No affiliation, just a happy customer.)

[1]: https://sindresorhus.com/gifski

For Mac Users...

Apple + Shift + 4, then hit Space and you can capture screenshots of specific Windows.

(This has been around forever, but easy to come across people who didn't know about it.)

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

> 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.

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.

Fair, I was thinking more about device compatibility.

It is very frustrating that github doesn’t allow videos in their issue threads. I often get bug reports that include an animated gif that captures the bug in action, and quite often I need to loop several times before I can figure out the order of actions. If these were video I could just start from the beginning.

This was introduced in Mojave, not Catalina.

TIL, thanks! The one good thing about LICEcap is you can position the box over anything and record just a small area. Can you use option with cmd + shift + 5 or any other modifier to just choose one part of the screen?

It probably won't replace iShowU or OBS for all the features I sometimes need, but a quick screengrab video would be nice now and then.

> Can you use option with cmd + shift + 5 or any other modifier to just choose one part of the screen?

Yes. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208721

I didn't know osx could do screen recordings like that (without having to open quicktime). +1

But... I will still use LICEcap for github pull requests, because github rejected the video I made with osx (file type? size?)

I believe it is mov instead of mp4. mp4 would be great since it takes much much less space.

MOV and MP4 are container formats, so MOV can be smaller than MP4 depending on the video formats used.

Sure, but there's no option to control which format it creates the capture in. Besides I end up ffmpeg converting it to mp4 and get a video about 10x smaller.

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