What screen recording/screencast software do y'all use? I've had issue with pretty much everything I've tried.
(My use case is making simple webM or gif recordings to post on Mastodon or in README files, etc. and I'm on arch linux, so I have pretty wide package availability)
@codesections I'm on Arch as well. I use SimpleScreenRecorder. It uses libx264 but then I transcode to WebM for web hosts that don't already transcode (gfycat does its own transcoding)
Hmm, I tried that out (I do want a simple screen recorder, after all…) but I kept getting errors about the recording failing to start correctly.
Maybe I should give it another shot—I moved on pretty quickly after those error
@codesections SimpleScreenRecorder is alright but I usually use OBS
@trawzified I'll give OBS a try
@codesections You can, with great difficulty, integrate ffmpeg into an app so that it can record itself.
I did this for a few games. If the game also had demo recording, I could then record perfect videos without dropping any frames.
@codesections I've had great success with Peek (https://github.com/phw/peek), also available from AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/peek-git/. It can do the "record a defined rectangle" thing, supports webm and gif output too (I mostly used webm, no idea how well the gif output works, but webm->gif is fairly easy with ffmpeg).
@codesections Peek. It records GIF, WebM, or MP4 and works on X and Wayland too.
There are native packages for various distros and even a Flatpak of it on Flathub:
https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.uploadedlobster.peek
man ✅
@codesections
I've had success with OBS and gtk-recordmydesktop. The latter is super simple and is my typical choice for anything not-streaming
@codesections there's a builtin screenrecorder in gnome
Good to know. I'm not running gnome at the moment, though I have heard good things about the latest version. But I'm pretty tied to dwm
@codesections Personally I find animated gif screen demos close to useless since they tend to play very quickly and you can't pause them to get a chance to read what's on the screen. So an actual video or a series of screenshots is more useful.
That makes sense.
I tend to like gifs as a way to demo something that's under ~7-10 seconds (like a quick use of a CLI command) but agree that they can be tiresome for something longer
@codesections It seems strange that browsers don't have a way to pause gifs.
@codesections You know what's weird. In the Mastodon web app, you can right-click a gif and get options to pause, play, loop, etc. Why can't Firefox and Chromium do that?
@leadore @codesections Because it not real gif; it's an mp4 disguised as a GIF.
@wizzwizz4 Oh yeah, that makes sense. :)
@codesections peek, the best thing ever
@xdej @codesections With this simple script https://paste.ee/p/4kGyv (you need ffmpeg and ffcast though)
@immae Thanks. I p1ste the code here for posterity:
#!/bin/bash
GEOMETRY=`ffcast -s % echo "%D+%g"`
DISP=`echo $GEOMETRY | cut -d'+' -f1`
SIZE=`echo $GEOMETRY | cut -d'+' -f2`
X=`echo $GEOMETRY | cut -d'+' -f3`
Y=`echo $GEOMETRY | cut -d'+' -f4`
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
OUTPUT=out.gif
else
OUTPUT=${1}.gif
fi
ffmpeg -y -f x11grab -framerate 25 -video_size $SIZE -i $DISP+$X,$Y -vf crop="iw-mod(iw\,2):ih-mod(ih\,2)" $OUTPUT
@xdej @codesections (ffcast is what permits you to select a rectangle at the initial step. The cursor should change, but it depends on your desktop environment)
(what I'd really like is a screencast version of `scrot - s`—something I can invoke from the command line and target a defined rectangle to record. But I don't think that really exists)