Recording screen to .gif / .webm on Fedora 35

It seems there are no friendly tools to record screencasts on Fedora.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ScreenCasting

Native Gnome recorder (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R) records only 30 seconds and exposes no user interface to change record duration, select the screen area or target format. Needless to say it doesn’t allow to edit the screencast to drop unnecessary frames.

byzanz - simply doesn’t work on Wayland.

➜  ~ byzanz-record
usage: byzanz-record [OPTIONS] filename
       byzanz-record --help
➜  ~ byzanz-record /tmp/xxx
Given area is not inside desktop.

wf-recorder should work on Wayland, but on Fedora it does not.

➜  ~ wf-recorder                 
compositor doesn't support wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1

simplescreenrecorder honestly tells that it doesn’t work.

image


So is there anything that works out of the box with the following features?

  • no 30 seconds limit on records
  • allow to cut unnecessary frames
  • allow to select target format (gif, webm, …)
  • allow to select screen area
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FWIW, I’ve been switching to X11 mode and using SimpleScreenRecorder.

BTW, in case you didn’t know, it is possible to change the default recording limit for GNOME recorder. For example:

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys max-screencast-length 3600
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This particular question has been asked on Ask Fedora before, so may be worth looking there also:

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/no-working-screencast-or-recording-program-for-fedora-33-34/61355/5

The consensus seems to be to use simplescreenrecorder from RPM Fusion with X (since it does not support wayland yet, or didn’t when folks had last checked).

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/how-to-install-simple-screen-recorder-in-fedora-33/76953/3

There is the longest fork of green-recorder which may work - GitHub - dvershinin/green-recorder: A simple screen recorder for Linux desktop. Supports Wayland & Xorg Need to try this.

Would be nice if wiki contained the updated info instead of requiring people to ask every few months.

I couldn’t get the fork to run - it hangs for me. But I found that it uses GNOME screen recorded interface through dbus and after searching for this interface found another tools that finally works!

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Sure—would you like to set up a wiki page or a quick doc on this please?

(I personally prefer that folks go to Ask Fedora and search/ask questions because that way it becomes a self maintaining, self curated source of information. With wikis/docs, someone has to regulary go through them to ensure that they’re all up to date.)

There should be a limit of going into rabbit holes to shave yaks at which one needs to stop, or he will have nothing to eat. So unfortunately, I can only contribute a small rant about Ask Fedora as a source of information.

What are the chances that I could discover Kooha after finding two closed answers with not such option? StackOverflow at least allows to add new and edit answers, which is necessary to make a source of information self-curated or self-maintaining, but not enough. For that to be enough, there should be a gameplay, like points, popularity or something. Editing a wiki page on the internet that even original authors doesn’t seem to care about much is not inspiring. Or maybe they care, but there is no way to get in touch with them. The ideal workflow is a magazine article with some initial research, which gets comments for a while and then converted to “quick doc” that is updated and discussed as new people jump in. I guess that wiki page has thousands of hits every month, but 0 engagement for the function that is very critical to any development and getting feedback about software wrongdoings.

Quite high actually given the vast ecosystem of FOSS tools out there. :slight_smile:

Both Ask Fedora and Discussion.fp.o are Discourse instances that does have gamification built in—users get rewarded for interacting with the platformsn and so on.

Wiki pages do not have owners—they’re open for everyone in the community to edit, just like the documentation.

Sure—would you like to write the article?

We already try to convert popular questions/magazine posts into quick-docs. Here’s an eg:

Well, I understand all the opportunities. Just finding excuses not to do this, because the problem is already solved. :smiley: What is not solved is editing the resulting .gif, for which I had to usegifsicle (size optimization) + gifcurry (trimming). Next time I will try losslesscut.

It sounds more fun to record a video with review of available tools and their UI/UX, and problems encountered, but doing this alone is not very exciting.

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I’m a little late here, but some time ago I’ve found OBS Studio from rpmfusion repository it’s working quite well with F35/Wayland.

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I remember it was not easy to setup the OBS Studio it you have no experience with it. And I am not sure it can produce .gif output.