GIF/SVG kind of compression for Video

Question

I am looking for a solution to compress screen recording. Imagine a coding tutorial involving mostly text and windows and almost no graphics other than icons and occasional view of the wallpaper.

Since the content on the screen is mostly static and contains large patches of the same color, I suppose there is a very good scope compression if the codec is optimized of this kind of use case. GIF (still image) is very good at compressing large rectangular areas of single color. SVG is very good at compressing images that really vectors. For certain types of content, these formats far outperform JPEG in size while delivering superior or equivalent image quality. I am looking for a similar technology for video. It has to compress the content described above really well in terms of output size as compared to a general purpose video codec. It need not be very good at capturing motion other than mouse/cursor movement and occasional window movement.

Answer 1

I wonder if the original Citrix ICA or for that effect Nomachine's NX, Microsoft RDP or even VNC would be of your interest. From what I understand of ICA and NX that idea was really to be in between of window manager calls, giving it an ultimate access to 'small updates' opposed to complete framebuffers. By a bit of searching I found VNCREC. The biggest problem with the to 'vector' format is that most font rendering is very far from the original text, so you would need something very in between, maybe such as GTK Broadway which goes into HTML5.