j-gif

Screen recording to GIF for Python, implemented in Rust.

Frames are captured through DXGI Desktop Duplication (via hdrcapture, so HDR highlights are tone-mapped instead of clipped) with Win32 GDI (BitBlt) as the fallback, compressed to JPEG and kept in a native frame store, then encoded to GIF -- all on native threads, so the GIL is never held during recording or export.

A process can hold only one DXGI duplication per monitor. RecordSession opens its own on the recording thread, so release any other session first, or pass prefer_dxgi=False to record with GDI only.

Opening the DXGI session takes around 100 ms. To start recording without that delay, prepare the session while the recording UI is up and begin it later:

session = gifrecorder.RecordSession.prepare()        # builds the DXGI session now
session.begin(store, left, top, width, height, fps)  # first frame arrives immediately

• FrameStore -- accepts BGRA/RGB frames, stores them JPEG-compressed, exports GIF
• FrameDecoder -- background decoding for playback over a bounded channel
• RecordSession -- recording state machine (recording / paused / stopped)

The distribution is j-gif; the module imports as gifrecorder.

import gifrecorder

store = gifrecorder.FrameStore(width, height, fps, jpeg_quality=90)
store.push_bgra(bgra_bytes, elapsed_ms)      # once per captured frame
store.export_gif("out.gif", repeat=0)

Playback can start directly at a frame without decoding earlier JPEGs:

decoder = store.start_decoder(display_w=640, display_h=360, start_frame=100)
try:
    frame = decoder.next_frame()  # (RGB bytes, original elapsed_ms), or None
finally:
    decoder.stop()

start_frame defaults to zero. An index at or beyond the end produces an empty decoder. total_frames counts frames from the chosen start to the end, and fetched_count starts at zero. Timestamps remain relative to the original recording. This parameter is available in j-gif 0.3.1 and later.

Windows x86_64 or ARM64, CPython 3.11+ (abi3). Part of jietuba. MIT licensed.