Blue Recorder – A Green Recorder replacement

Green Recorder was once a very popular simple screen recording application that supports both Xorg and Wayland. But at the time of this writing, the application is no longer updated anymore. Sure, die-hard fanatics can still install and use the program under recent operating system version, but no one likes using an outdated engine. In this article, we will cover everything about Blue Recorder – the new fork of Green Recorder. Blue Recorder is still using GTK+ 3 and FFMPEG powers internally, but now written in Rust

Blue Recorder Notable Features

• FFMPEG detection that is automatic. If you have already installed FFMPEG, Blue Recorder should be able to make use of it immediately without any further configuration.

• The new GIF format recording feature in Blue Recorder will make your recordings look 10x better than before (with FFMPEG).

• Supports all of the popular video formats, including mp4, m4v, avi, mkv, wmv, etc.

• Blue Recorder captures your mouse pointer with ease!

• Our advanced features make it easy to get the most out of your video. Multiple audio streams, record a part of the screen, and profile-based video quality selection are all easy to use and customizable.

• Wayland recording using the GNOME Shell Wayland Session which is packaged with a screencast tool

• Equipped with an user-friendly graphical interface that is both simple and intuitive.

How to use Blue Recorder

Blue Recorder’s interface is uncomplicated and easy to use, greeting users with a small window that has just a text box and a few buttons.

To record your screen, first give the program where you want to save your video a filename. You can do this by entering the file name in the File Name (Will be overwritten) text box. Please note that the filename here should not contain any extension, even if it does, the extension would be ignored.

Now that you know the name of your desired output file, it’s time to choose its format. The MKV format is the most popular option, but if you want to save your video in a different format, just select it from the drop-down menu below the text box.

To record audio and video from the microphone, we can check the Record Microphone and Record Video boxes. If we want to record the mouse pointer as well, we can check the Show Mouse box. If we’re only recording a small part of the screen near the mouse pointer, we can select the Follow Mouse option.

Get started recording your screen with just a few clicks. Depending on your needs, clicking Select a Window or Select an Area will give you the ability to record a single window or a small part of the screen. Finally, clicking Record button at the top of the screen will begin the recording process. Doing so without clicking either Select a Window or Select an Area will capture the whole screen as it’s the default option.

How to install Blue Recorder on Ubuntu

Blue Recorder is available as Snap and Flatpak package, both can be easily installed in Ubuntu.

Install Blue Recorder with Snap

Snaps are applications packaged with all their dependencies to run on all popular Linux distributions from a single build. They update automatically and roll back gracefully. Snap support is added to standard Ubuntu distribution since version 16.04, so if you’re running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) or later, including Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa), you don’t need to do anything. Snap is already installed and ready to go.

In order to install Blue Recorder as a snap package, just run the following command in any terminal window :

sudo snap install blue-recorder

Install Blue Recorder with Flatpak

Flatpak support is not included with Ubuntu right out of the box. In order to add Flatpak to your system, you have to run the following command in a terminal window.

sudo apt install flatpak

Once it’s done, you can start installing the actual Blue Recorder by running :

flatpak install flathub sa.sy.bluerecorderCode language: CSS (css)

The flatpak package only provides basic functionality, in order to make the most from Flatpak, we will need a compatible application store such as the good old GNOME Software. Ubuntu comes with its own Software Store which only installs snaps and deb files. Install GNOME Software and the flatpak add-on by running the following commands :

sudo apt install gnome-software gnome-software-plugin-flatpak

Then we add the Flathub repository to the GNOME store :

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepoCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

The program will be automatically added to Ubuntu application launcher right after the installation.

Install Blue Recorder from source

Users who don’t like either snap or flatpak can choose to build Blue Recorder from source. You’re going to need Rust installed along with the dependencies below before you proceed.

ffmpeg
gtk
gdk
gio
gettext
libappindicator3
x11-utils
pulseaudio

If you’re using Ubuntu or any other Debian-based distro, you can install these dependencies by running

sudo apt install build-essential clang cargo libappindicator3-1 x11-utils gettext pulseaudio ffmpeg

Then, you have to use Cargo to build Blue Recorder

git clone https://github.com/xlmnxp/blue-recorder
cd blue-recorder
cargo build --release
cp -a data interfaces po target/releaseCode language: PHP (php)

The generated executable file is placed at blue-recorder/target/release/blue-recorder. Rust uses static linking to compile its programs, meaning that all libraries required by even the simplest Hello world! program will be compiled into your executable. So the executable included the Rust runtime and you can copy it to wherever you want without worrying that any relative path may break.

Conclusion

We hope that this article helps you discover a suitable desktop screen recorder to replace Green Recorder. If you are interested in post-processing your video file, you may want to check out or list of The Best Linux Video Converters. If you have any questions, then please feel free to ask in the comments below.