Green-recorder
Version: 3.0.4 Web: https://github.com/foss-project
We’re not sure whether Canonical is brave enough to boot the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 to Wayland by default (looks like it is), but other major distros, such as Fedora, ship Gnome desktops that silently boot to a Wayland session instead of X.org. We really love Wayland as a cool next-gen technology, but it’s still not mature enough in some regards. One of its shortcomings was its inability to record a screencast, which now seems to be fixed. Meet Green-recorder, a small, stylish GTK3 app that’s ideal for recording videos of what’s happening on your desktop, and the first recorder that works in a Wayland session out of the box.
Green-recorder is based on Python, GTK3 and FFmpeg, and thus supports many video formats, including MKV, AVI, MP4, WMV, GIF and more. When used with Wayland, Green-recorder can only write video using the WebM format and compress the data using the V8 encoder, instead of the more recent V9. That’s the price you pay for Wayland right now, but we think it’s not too high. Green-recorder captures video data using the built-in screencast feature in Gnome Shell and records audio using FFmpeg, then merges both tracks into a single WebM file. The application also produces very nice GIF outputs. We compared GIF recordings made using pure FFmpeg and Greenrecorder, and admitted that the latter was far smoother – that’s because Green-recorder makes GIFs out of the raw uncompressed video data.
Although the Green-recorder interface is very simple, it gives you all the necessary features right at your fingertips, and enables you to set up frame rate, destination directory, file format and audio input source, and even execute custom commands after the recording is finished. The Green-recorder developer advertises pre-built packages for various Linux distributions, so in most cases, you only need to worry about copying and pasting the necessary lines from the Readme.md document.
“The first recorder that works in a Wayland session out of the box”