Hello friends,
it’s been more than 10 years of GifCam! time flies without wings, thank you for using and supporting the app to keep it alive through all these years.
Now it’s time to finalize things and ensuring to add all the important features and fixes:

• Colormaps Editor: to change all identical colors, hold Shift and click on the color panel.

• Option for adding PNG images overlay with scale and alpha options.

• Export To MP4: No external encoder is needed; GifCam utilizes the Microsoft Media Foundation H.264 video encoder that comes with Windows 7 and later.

• Improving the custom window with more options: bits per pixel, snap colors, rise transparency, and frame sample/ The above example reduced the GIF file size by over 80% with lower pixel details: 3 bits per pixel, 5 color snap and 7 rise transparency.

• Adding a track bar instead of a text box for memory usage.
• Option for picking a transparent color.
• Many important fixes: minimize memory consumption, reduce artifacts/ fixing AVI encoding /fixing wrong width x height when opining a gif file/ Adding margins 3 pixels to the main app window: Because windows 11 round corners cut part of recording area! and many other fixes and enhancements…

GifCam 7.7 Get it here

My blog friends, I hope you’re doing well :)  Here is a new update which is based on the most frequently requested features and fixes:

• Quantize Windows Color Reduction: Reduce to an optimal 256 color Windows palette. It’s slow encoding, but in some cases it gives better color-matching than quantize.
• Option for global CTRL+R shortcut key for rec/stop.
• Option for saving last position: If this option is not checked, the gifcam app will open in the center of the desktop.

• Auto-space between frames and delay labels regardless of system font size.

• Fixed Windows XP right click menu.
• Some other bug fixes.

Get it here 

I’ve received some feedback about getting a black gif when using GifCam to capture Netflix and other apps & webs, I’m not into movies  & shows , but anyway I created a new basic Netflix account to find out the case.

DirectX

at first I thought it’s a technical problem, where the Netflix stream goes into GPU/graphics card instead of RAM , and that’s why it can’t be captured, so I wrote DirectX level capturing code to capture the  pixels from the GPU, but that didin’t work, it turned out that Netflix martials is copyrighted with something called DRM (Digital Rights Management).

Virtual Machine

After that I thought to run Netflix inside a virtual machine (I used Microsoft Windows Simulator) and with that the pixels would not be blocked or restricted when capturing from the host, and I was right :)

FireFox

Then I googled the subject more, and found that the browser Firefox  has a feature to disable DRM tools, actually the DRM is disabled by default, so you can run Netflix inside Firefox without any capturing restriction, and that is the easier way I guess.

But is it illegal to make gifs from Netflix?

I don’t know, but you must follow the Netflix Terms of Use and the copyright law

Finally

That was a little research I made, and I hope you find it useful :)

GifCam 6.0 comes with quality improvements update:

• Scalable user interface: GifCam 6.0 scales to fit the display resolution.

• Improvement of the transparent/green screen color detection.
• Changing the default save name to Date+Ttime.
• Updating About dialog and adding support options.
• Other minor bug fixes and improvements.

Get it here

Dear people who use GifCam,
It’s been nearly two years since the last update of GifCam! ):  sigh.. I know,
but I’ve decided “strongly” to come up with a new and improved version :) and to fulfill my promises of polishing the software, also I’ve found a lot of nice people in the comments and the social media still prefer GifCam over other gif recorders, so it’s nice to make it better :)

Here is GifCam 5.5 I will keep it on this blog post as a Beta for testing and feedback before approving it on the official GifCam page:

• Automatically detect and set transparent/greenscreen color, so if your recording contains green color the transparent/greenscreen will be set to red, if it contains green & red it will be blue and so on..

this feature will be helpful for many users who haven’t figured out how to change the greenscreen color manually, thinking there is a bug in gifcam , also you can still change it manually if you like to get the effect of having one of the recording color matching the transparing color which create an interesting effects sometimes :)

• An option for saving “setting.ini” in the same gifcam directory, with that option you can move your settings with GifCam.exe and you can have multiple GifCam.exe with different settings.

• GifCam 5.5 can access/use 4GB address space on 64 bit computers which is the maximum memory usage for 32bit applications.

• Accurate pixel perfect recording area calculations (in older versions recording area does not match the output gif accurately)

• fixing “recording outside area” & “black border” for some high screen resolution displays.

• Supporting dropping gif file on the main GifCam window to open it.

I used to reply to all your comments and take suggestions considerably to improve and polish GifCam (nowadays I don’t know if I have the energy & time to reply to all your comments but for sure I would read them all seriously), so if you have any suggestions/features you are more than welcome.

Finally I would like to apologize for the “too late update”, and I hope you like the new features :)

Update:
one comment @Adam mentioned a “recording outside area” bug when scaling the display more than 100% I fixed that! and updated the binary! other than that I see no other issues, so I will update GifCam home page with version 5.5 soon , GifCam 5.5 Final Release is Here, thank you for the feedback :)