Free video capture programs include CamStudio, HyperCam, and .kkapture (alternate URL), among others. TechSmith, maker of the commercial Camtasia, also has a free app Jing for capturing as well but is limited to 5 mins at a time (not a problem for the preview video).

Use FFmpeg to convert to the chosen formats if needed. Free cross-platform video editors apparently include Avidemux, Jahshaka/CineFX, the not-yet-stable VLMC, and the Linux-specific OpenShot is expected to go cross-platform by the end of 2013 after a successful Kickstarter. Linux-specific include LiVES, Kdenlive, and Cinelerra ("community version"). Nothing specifically Mac is available for free. This list on Wikipedia has more.

I'd use FFmpeg for splitting and joining if nothing else is available. Once OpenShot is finally cross-platform, that will likely be the one I recommend from then on.

(edit - added LiVES)

Thanks for the fonts, Neo!

Regarding icons, I looked into this when I was trying to make a new startup game. One of the earlier startup games (1.0) could do it. The icon file had to be a 32x32 PNG file, and there was a special .dat file next to the game.sgm that contained info on which file exactly it was.
I was thinking having something like an icon.png inside the project root folder could be a reliable way to find the game icon.
Also, a screenshot.png in the game's project root in a similar fashion.

Regarding video: interesting idea! Node-webkit supports WebM by default, so no cross-converting would be necessary (well, that is, as long as other projects that decide to use the video also keep using WebM).

Things are coming along nicely! That screenshot and icon are detected and taken from the game directory. Same for video. If it doesn't find either, it'll just show some "no screenshot available" text.

Does it take from one path or many? My Sphere Studio has a feature that takes a list of paths and finds all games in that list. That way I can enumerate from different sphere versions and other special development folders (like github etc).

It currently searches one path (and a fixed one at that!) for games specifically. From the start I'm keeping multiple paths in mind, though. I want the user to be able to just define a whole bunch of games paths. It has something to do with how I organize all the games I've collected over time (in categorized folders, without any engine or editor files nearby).

I don't search for Sphere itself at all yet, but yeah, there should be a way to link those paths together. Like define a valid path that contains Sphere and extract its games. And have a default engine location for all those Sphere games that aren't in a games directory...

Here's some progress on the sphere-sfml, I got windowstyle loading, and the FPS is really nice! SphereGL has this at 1600, while the screenshot in sphere-sfml is at 8400.

Nice progress! You got that working pretty quickly.

Awesome work. Good to see hard work paying off.

game.sgm loads, and so do the first few lines of info.txt!
Also, video works (if a video.webm is found in the game dir).
Oh, and the path is displayed.

Now for the rest of the info.txt I'll need to start using a Markdown library. That'll come later.

...I've been posting a lot of screens here. Maybe I should just make a new thread?

Font loading! As you can see, font displaying takes a hit. I just wanted to implement it quick and dirty. The next step is to put all letters in one texture atlas and then blit portions of that single texture to screen. This will reduce the number of memory calls on the gpu and speed things up considerably. It's hard to put them in one atlas since each letter is saved separately. I'll have to add to the atlas as each letter is loaded.

I think I have the pieces to start loading graphics only games; games that don't use the map engine.

I'll try the KH2Bar by Bruce.

Edit: and Bruce's KH2Bar demo works!

@DV: Prefer the font you had previously over the one that's there now. Fitted better.

Alright, got a packed texture atlas going for the fonts. The speedup is significant but not exactly where I want it. At least the FPS went from under 2600 to just over 4900! In SphereGL this test is only at 1300, so it's really quite the improvement.

Bruces KH2 game is very slow though, at under 700 fps. In SphereGL however it is at 3500 fps but it doesn't even render the bar!  The bar disappears at over 30 fps? Weird? Also in my version the colors are off slightly despite having the exact same RGBA values. I think it has to do with the BlendColors function? Nope - it was just that it was drawing the lines off by 1. Weird, I fixed my drawing problem and now the same issue that's in Sphere is in my game. I'm happy and disappointed. Oh well,

Jeez, makes me want to see how TurboSphere handles kh2bar...

That off by 1 error is one of the classic complaints against SphereGL, too. That's a weird kind of consistency.

Well, GradientRectangles seem to be the thing slowing down the KH2 demo. I have a plan though... It involves creating a static gradient texture, preferably the size of the screen and then scaling it to the places I want it blitted... It might just do well enough or completely fail. The bad thing is the worst case secnario is that each frame the colors change: such as a gradient background fading from one color to the next. I don't know what else... I might have to create a custom GLSL shader for fast gradients.

Well, at least I'm happy that windowstyles don't have an off by one issue, even on 2x scaling. However, lines are not scaling. In OpenGL, lines are not pixels per-se they are entities. I'll need to find a good way of drawing pixel-sized lines.

Hey Radnen, that's a nice font, any chance I could get a copy of that?