Feature Request - Automation to capture Flash results

[daniel]

Hi Mouser,

I am trying to automate Screenshot Captor to capture many Macromedia Flash files.

In other words, I want to load a Flash, wait a second for it to finish playing, capture it, load another, wait a second, capture it, ...

For example, I have flash1.swf, flash2.swf, flash3.swf. I want to automatically convert them to JPEG, obviously without the animation. The JPEG gives a decent preview of the swf files. If possible, it would be great to specify parameters for the swf files too. For example, "flash1.swf?arg1=Hello_World".

Is there a way to do this?

[mouser]

i think supporting some kind of automation sounds really fun.

i can think of a couple of possibilities:

1) not changing screenshot captor at all, and just using a commandline tool to trigger one of screenshot captors global hotkeys.  this sounds like a great idea for a tiny commandline coding snack.  then you could use a batch file or another one of the apps on this site (drag+drop robot) to launch a series of .swf files one after the other followed by the hotkey to capture the active window.  this should work.  one downside is that you wouldn't be able to tell screenshot captor how to name the files.  upside is its easiest.

2) adding some commandline argument functions to screenshot captor - this would let you specify a capture to perform on the commandline, like "screenshotcaptor.exe -c activewindow -o outputfile.jpg" to tell it to capture active window and save result in "outputfile.jpg".  this wouldn't be much work but seems a bit overkill given sc's prolonged startup time.  probably you could find another capture tool for this - i could even make one.

3) adding a windows-message based autoamation to screenshot captor that would allow it to receive commands from other apps to do things like capture windows and report back the file names, etc.  this requires the most work on my part, and is also not immediately useable from simple commandline use..

other thoughts?