09-27-2019, 02:51 PM
Looks like I have managed to make video capture work great on Linux. One of my priorities is saving episodes of animated TV shows off cable TV, mostly older stuff in 4:3 standard definition. Below is an episode of the Nelvana show "Babar" that I managed to encode in MKV format (MPEG-4 ASP, AAC audio). It clocks in around 130mb for a 25 minute recording, which is around what it was using my previous Windows-based tools. I used an Avidemux preset for "animation". Compression artifacts aren't that bad, but then again the digital cable stream itself did have some compression evident.
I also changed the Xfce theme to "Greybird" which originated from Xubuntu, but now available for other GTK-based desktop environments such as MATE or GNOME 3.xx. It's much easier on the eyes IMO since it's not as bright as my previous theme. It's kind of a nice halfway point between light and dark themes. It also has a slightly macOS style appearance while still retaining some originality with the window button designs.
VLC may look a bit off, but that's because it uses Qt 5 for widgets. Under Linux, there's lots of toolkits for creating GUIs, but the two most used are GTK (used in GNOME, MATE, Xfce, and many FOSS apps like GIMP and LibreOffice), and Qt (KDE, VLC, Avidemux, etc). The main issue, in my current case, is making Qt apps look like their GTK counterparts, and with Adwaita, it's simple since that theme exists for both toolkits. But Greybird hasn't been brought to Qt yet, so apps like VLC still use Adwaita theming. It's not too far off from Greybird, but it's lighter than it should be.
A tool Mageia provides is "qt5ct", a GUI for setting the themes used by Qt apps. It makes adjusting Qt themes a lot easier provided you have a corresponding Qt theme to match your current GTK one. You can even set the fonts and icons to match GTK apps as well.
I also changed the Xfce theme to "Greybird" which originated from Xubuntu, but now available for other GTK-based desktop environments such as MATE or GNOME 3.xx. It's much easier on the eyes IMO since it's not as bright as my previous theme. It's kind of a nice halfway point between light and dark themes. It also has a slightly macOS style appearance while still retaining some originality with the window button designs.
VLC may look a bit off, but that's because it uses Qt 5 for widgets. Under Linux, there's lots of toolkits for creating GUIs, but the two most used are GTK (used in GNOME, MATE, Xfce, and many FOSS apps like GIMP and LibreOffice), and Qt (KDE, VLC, Avidemux, etc). The main issue, in my current case, is making Qt apps look like their GTK counterparts, and with Adwaita, it's simple since that theme exists for both toolkits. But Greybird hasn't been brought to Qt yet, so apps like VLC still use Adwaita theming. It's not too far off from Greybird, but it's lighter than it should be.
A tool Mageia provides is "qt5ct", a GUI for setting the themes used by Qt apps. It makes adjusting Qt themes a lot easier provided you have a corresponding Qt theme to match your current GTK one. You can even set the fonts and icons to match GTK apps as well.