Simple Free Screen Recorder

[Lorriane Nasuti]

SimpleScreenRecorderis a Linux program that I've created to record programs and games. There were already a few programs that could do this, but I wasn't 100% happy with any of them, so I created my own.

My original goal was to create a program that was just really simple to use, but as I was writing it I started adding more and more features, and the result is actually a pretty powerful program. It's 'simple' in the sense that it's easier to use than ffmpeg/avconv or VLC, because it has a straightforward user interface.

As of april 2023 the 'simplescreenrecorder' package was moved to AUR due to not having a package maintainer. You can install it from AUR, or alternatively you can install 'simplescreenrecorder-git' to get the very latest version from git master.

Install 'simplescreenrecorder' from the Packman repository. If you want to record 32-bit OpenGL applications on a 64-bit system, you should also install 'libssr-glinject-32bit'. This package was created by Dmitriy (DAP-DarkneSS).

If you are using an older version of Ubuntu, or you want to get the latest version of SimpleScreenRecorder immediately without waiting for the next Ubuntu release, you can also get the package(s) from the SimpleScreenRecorder PPA:

For distributions that don't have official packages, you have to compile it yourself for now. It's not that hard, and there are instructions in the readme file. You can find the source code on GitHub:

If you're not familiar with git and you just want a .tar.gz file, download this:

So i had been making video tutorials for my friends on how to program. On my old computer i had been all ways running simple screen recorder and it recorded fine. But recently i got a new computer. And so when i got a fresh install of arch linux on the box. I set up the environment with every thing i needed to make another video. When i downloaded simple screen recorder using yaourt, and started recording. I had recorded up to a two hour session with out knowing that it was glitching out. When i look at my computer i do not see the same issue as when the final product is done rendering. I think it might be a rendering error or i do not have the right codecs. After a hour or two searching on the web i could find no forum posts on the codec. I took in multiple things that could be wrong with it fps was my first choice but when i had recorded with 25 and even 50 fps it was still glitching out. The next idea i had was that i had the wrong codec H.264. But with searching i could find no solution to that one. Then i thought that i might have been encoding at to high of a speed (23). But still that proved me wrong. so now i am confused with how to get my answer.

Am impressed by Tahrpup32 6.0.5, working well on my Dell Inspiron 1300 with Celeron CPU, with 2G RAM, SSR starts fine and I see the red dot icon, BUT cannot save the file and stop the SSR. Right clicking on the icon or even clicking on save the recording does nothing. I have to xkill the SSR.

Tonight, coincidentally, I have been experimenting with two other screen recording apps: vokoscreen-ng (as well as older vokoscreen that uses ffmpeg) and kazam (I used a PPA to get absolute latest 1.5.3 available since it has include webcam feature). Whilst I don't know if the latest kazam would work with tahrpup, an older version certainly should (they have older versions back to Natty, Maverick I believe). It uses Python so may depend on how good your python install in TahrPup is though. Since I haven't yet tried Tahrpup, though I have a plan to, I can't yet say how easy or otherwise kazam would be to install, but I certainly recommend it - nice simple interface and minimises to tray on my Zorin system. Vokostream-ng also good, but very latest was a big install (uses GStreamer and Qt, not ffmpeg); older versions ok though, but again would depend what dependencies it needs. I decided to go with kazam 1.5.3 since it is working well for me thus far.

Note, if you can, get kazam 1.5.3 version (worth a try in tahrpup, but otherwise find older one) for the webcam and youtube live broadcast extra capability. You need the special PPA given in the following links for that one:

-screen-recorder/

-to-record-s ... ith-kazam/

xvidcap remains my favorite screen recorder as it's easy to just record a region of one's desktop. ... vidcap.png. Just drag the borders. Mike Walsh has provided portable versions for both 32 and 64 bits and explained how to configure it to record sound. ... 884#p38884

The maintainer, Martin Nordholts, who freely admits on the website that despite being responsible for the project he's been "otherwise engaged" for well over a decade (!), has actually updated it in recent months to v0.4.0. It is, however, source code only.....you need to compile it yourself.

You don't get a choice of codecs/formats. It uses the OGG container, with Theora for video & Vorbis for audio.....and that's your lot. But these ARE universally recognised formats - YouTube is quite happy to accept OGG - so it's not the problem you might imagine it to be. And their use satisfies the open-source crowd.

I'd recommend it to anyone. Needs a couple of tweaks in the Settings for best performance in Puppy, but those are simple enough to do. It's available in all older 'buntu-based Pups, though for some reason it's been dropped from the repos in recent years. Vokoscreen seems to be grabbing maximum "market share" for this category!.

Instead of ffmpeg, Tahrpup uses something called avconv. This is a kind of 'fake' version of ffmpeg, and was forked off from ffmpeg a couple of years prior to Tahr's release due to a major clash of personalities within the FFMPEG Project. For some reason, someone at Canonical decided - with Tahr's release - to replace ffmpeg with avconv instead.....which was a daft decision:-

As I say, I don't know if last version of kazam would work on Tahr (though I suspect it might if carefully assembled for the purpose), but attached is screenshot of it's main window, with configuration opened. As you should see, it covers making a screencast of fullscreen, or of a selected window, or of a cursor-selected area (with cursor draw round area of interest), and can include webcam video in the screen capture. Wex can do all of that too, but pause works fine with kazam (but not with wex, except for audio recording only). Also kazam can live stream direct to Youtube channel... It can use several sources for audio, just by selecting them via check box (admittedly, I have it working on system with pulseaudio installed).

Like wex, the most important detail, for me, is that kazam uses H264 or VP8 for its video capture codec, which is considerably better quality and size of recording_file than older programs like xvidcap, which as far as I remember use DIVX codec, so can't match H264 for small recording size or quality. Having said that, I quite like the interface of xvidcap too. Latest Vokoscreen gives you even more control of quality and audio streams and so on, but current download for that is large, whereas kazam is probably no bigger download than xvidcap, perhaps even smaller (depending on dependencies already on your system I suppose...). On my system, everything is GTK+3 so xvidcap is a pain to install unless using mikewalsh's portable app version (since that includes GTK+2 libs required for xvidcap); that portable app does work well though.

Despite some cons of using my program 'wex' as an alternative, it does provide good quality screencast (and optional auto-animated-gif making via a fredx181 utility it calls up) and has the advantage of just being a simple gtkdialog bash script, so tiny to include, but with the caveat that it needs a reasonably modern ffmpeg, so on Tahr it may well not perform well. However, mikewalsh did indeed create a portable version long time back that included all the bits and pieces needed for wex including a better ffmpeg than older systems came with by default. Wex is included by default in KLV-Airedale at the moment at least, and maybe some DebianDogs, because they already contain modern ffmpeg so wex (and Precord) inclusion costs next to nothing in terms of space needed to include (under 100 KB for the whole lot). Overall though - I'm sold on kazam for my own current needs.

T'other Mike's mention that recordmydesktop had been available for older Puppys inspired me to search for it. You'll find a couple of pets we've squirreled away at

... ges-lucid/

... es-slacko/. But don't scroll down to the 'R's. Their names begin with the preface 'gtk'.

I don't have a tarhpup set up to test either. To run under tahrpup either may need libraries and symbolic links. Starting via terminal and/or examining their respective binary with ListDD, ... 260#p32260 should identify any.

While you're fleshing things out, if tahrpup doesn't provide an ffconvert application (or similar) you might also want to hunt for one to convert vids you've created in ogg format to something else. You'll definitely want one if you're using xvidcap which only records to mpeg. You'll find fconvert-1.4.3.pet here, ... 548#p30548. IIRC, it also will need the ffmpeg to avconv symlink.

"No go" doesn't tell us anything useful.

Where did you get the package? tahrpup32's PPM points to the tahrpup repo on ibiblio which doesn't have gtk-recordmydesktop; and to the now closed/archived repos for Ubuntu Trusty Tahr.

What happens if you try to start gtk-recordmy desktop via a terminal command "gtk-recordMyDesktop" or whatever argument follows /usr/share/applications/gtk-recordmydesktop.desktop's Exec= argument?

What, if anything did ListDD report was missing?

Now open "dist-packages". You want to sym-link everything in "dist-packages" across to "site-packages". Highlight the lot, drag across to "site-packages" and drop the lot. (Just creating the entire directory as a symlink to "dist-packages" doesn't seem to work. Sym-linking the contents, however, does.)

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