Easy wasy to record the screen

[marcinjahn]

Sometimes there's a need to record some short video, mostly to capture some bug or similar.
I tested a few apps from flathub, and I found that the ones I used to use in other environments do not work under Niri:

• Kooha
• Blue Recorder

The only one that's working is https://flathub.org/apps/com.dec05eba.gpu_screen_recorder. The issue is that it can only record the whole screen, and not a part of it.
Probably the other option would be OBS, but it seems a bit heavy for the simple use case I have. Also, it seems to have some learning curve, I wasn't able to start the recording myself, probably I'll have to find some tutorial 😄

Does anyone know any other options? Or maybe, is built-in screen recorder planned for Niri, next to its screenshot tool?

[YaLTeR]

Fwiw in theory kooha and other gstreamer-based tools should work, but so far I haven't managed to get a pipewire gstreamer pipeline like this working. Not sure who is to blame.

I usually use OBS but I agree it's a bit clunky

[Plyply99]

I use wl-screenrec along with slurp.

https://github.com/russelltg/wl-screenrec

aplay ~/Music/click.wav && pkill wl-screenrec || wl-screenrec -g "$(slurp)" -f ~/Videos/Screencasts/$(date +'%s_vid.mp4')

This will play a sound and record a section of the screen. I have it saved as a bash script that I call with key bind.

Super+Ctrl+Shift+F12 { spawn "sh" "-c" "windowrec.sh"; }

The key bind acts as a toggle to start and stop recording.

[marcinjahn]

Thanks, that looks promising. Hit an issue early on, but hopefully it can be resolved russelltg/wl-screenrec#113

[Plyply99]

Do you have hardware accelerated codecs installed? They are not shipped with Fedora and need to be installed manually.

[marcinjahn]

Right, thanks again, I followed https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia, and now wl-screenrec seems to work! I get some messages like

Opening libva device from DRM device /dev/dri/renderD128
[h264_vaapi @ 0x55cf385d3040] No usable encoding entrypoint found for profile VAProfileH264High (7).
failed to open encoder in low_power mode (Function not implemented), trying non low_power mode. if you have an intel iGPU, set enable_guc=2 in the i915 module to use the fixed function encoder. pass --low-power=off to suppress this warning

but videos do get recorded, so I guess I can ignore it.

[marcinjahn]

In the end I integrated wl-screenrec with niri, mako and waybar to get a gnome-like experience.
You start/stop recording with key binding (like @Plyply99 showed), you get an indicator on waybar while screen recording is ongoing (when you click on it, recording gets stopped), and you get a clickable notification when the recording is finished (clicking opens up the video directory).
For anyone interested, have a look at my dotfiles:

• script invoked by niri
• waybar custom module