VMware Workstation 5.5

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Creating a Screen Shot or a Movie of a Virtual Machine

This section describes how to capture a visual record of a virtual machine, in a screen shot or movie.

Creating a Screen Shot of a Virtual Machine

You can capture a screen shot of a virtual machine. Choose VM > Capture Screen. You can save this image as a bitmap (.bmp) file on a Windows host or as a portable network graphics (.png) file on a Linux host.

Creating a Movie of a Virtual Machine

You can capture a movie of your activity within a virtual machine. Workstation saves this image as an .avi file on the host.

To capture a movie of virtual machine activity

1. Choose VM > Capture Movie.

A save file dialog box appears.

2. Enter information for your movie and click Save.

Type the filename of the movie file you want to save. The default name is based on the active virtual machine.

Select the directory location where you want the movie to be stored.

Select High, Medium, or Low quality from the drop-down menu. This choice determines the compression and therefore the file size of the resulting movie.

If you select Omit frames in which nothing occurs, the movie will only include those periods of time when something is actually happening in the virtual machine. This reduces the file size and length of the movie.

While movie capture is active, a red circle — a virtual LED — appears in the status bar at the lower right.

An indicator appears on the status bar during movie capture

3. Within the virtual machine, perform the actions you want to appear in the move.

4. Choose VM > Stop Movie Capture.

The red circle disappears from the status bar, and your movie is saved.

Playing a Movie Requires VMware CODEC

You can play back your movie in any compatible media player. However, a VMware CODEC (coder-decoder) must be installed. This CODEC is automatically installed on a machine with VMware Workstation. A separately downloadable installer is also available for playback of movies on machines without VMware Workstation.

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