Looking for: lightweight mouse recording software

[Drbek]

Hello, I would like to ask everyone, if you know a lightweight software for recording mouse position and movements, for example, I record a presentation and speech of the person presenting, but because of certain reasons I have to record screen without mouse, but the speaker uses mouse like a laser pointer. If I want to rewatch the presentation in the future, I wouldn't see the pointer anymore, so I want to record the mouse separately and add it later on in my player. Few notes, it cant be flagged by any antivirus as a malicious software and it has to be lightweight and somewhat simple to use, because the PCs some ppl are using to present feel more like toasters than computers. It would be awesome if the output of this software was some easily readable file format which I can parse using some script or simple programs made in C or Python.

[mariushm]

Look at  various macro recorders, automation shareware/freeware ... 

 

There's a Windows API functions which gives you the coordinates of the mouse, GetCursorPos : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/nf-winuser-getcursorpos

 

You have it in Python ... here's some example programs with it : https://www.programcreek.com/python/example/62991/win32api.GetCursorPos

 

So you could easily write a small python script that calls that functions a few times a second and logs the position and time when it changes, sort of like making a subtitle for the presentation. 

 

Curious why you can't record the pointer, is it the recording software that won't let you?  OBS is free and can sit hidden in system tray and record at very good quality and using low resources (depending on what codec and codec settings you choose) and you can set hotkeys to start and stop recording and all that. 

 

[Drbek]

Thanks a lot, didnt know about that API, that will be extremely helpful!

We use vMix to record and stream everything, and due to some limitations of our platform, we usually avoid recording presentations with cursor, in case some people do mistakes, like streamer moving cursor accidentally over the presentations during live streams or presenters being nervous and moving it all around all the time without any meaning, making the final editing quite a bit of pain sometimes.

Just a quick question about the API, it does record the position correctly even if the recording app/script is in the background and presentation is in foreground, right? 

[mariushm]

Yes, it should record no matter in what state your application is.  

May have some issues if you have multiple monitors connected to the video card... but by default you should get the x,y position of the mouse on the active monitor.