Gource without window/gui

Question

is there a possibility to run gource (scm-visualizer) completely without gui and windows? I just want to render the video to a file. This is possible with commands like:

gource --output-ppm-stream - | ffmpeg .. 

on linux. But not on a server-os without graphical interface. I did not find any clear statements about that.

Please tell me, if I missed something!

Kind regards,

Answer 1

Gource uses OpenGL for drawing and just optionally writes out the rendered frames afterwards, so it cannot run without a display.

https://github.com/acaudwell/Gource/wiki/Videos even mentions that the window should remain completely visible to avoid output problems.

Appenrently it can be used without a physical display with the help of xvfb-run, see https://github.com/FrankM1/gource/issues/29

Answer 2

This can be done with xvfb (X Virtual Framebuffer). To run and export a video:

xvfb-run gource -1280x720 -o - | ffmpeg -y -r 60 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i - -pix_fmt yuv420p gource.mp4