Green Recorder – Record your Linux screen easily

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You may have stumbled upon sites offering their viewers the ability to video chat and interact with them through their desktop screens. Sites such as Screencast-O-Matic, Camtasia and Jing make it easy for you to record your screen, capture screenshots of your computer, add audio commentary and share videos online. But in the Linux world, there are not that many programs that offer the same set of advanced desktop recording features. Green Recorder is a simple screen recording application that supports both Xorg and Wayland. Green Recorder was written in Python and use GTK+ 3 to power its GUI. Under the hood, Green Recorder leverages FFMPEG power to do most of its magic.

Contents hide
1 Green Recorder Notable Features :
2 How to use Green Recorder
3 How to install Green Recorder on Ubuntu
4 Conclusion

Green Recorder Notable Features :

  • Automatic FFMPEG detection. If you’ve already installed FFMPEG, Green Recorder should be able to make use of it immediately without any further configuration.
  • The new GIF format recording feature in Green Recorder will make your recordings 10x better than before (with FFMPEG).
  • Supports most of the popular video formats, including mp4, m4v, avi, mkv, wmv, etc.
  • Green Recorder has the ability to record mouse pointer capture.
  • Advanced features such as multiple audio streams, record a part of the screen, profile-based video quality selection, etc.
  • Wayland recording using the GNOME Shell Wayland Session which is packaged with a screencast tool
  • Simple but intuitive graphical user interface.

How to use Green Recorder

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The interface of the program is very simple. As we open Green Recorder, it greets us with a minimal window that contains just a text box and a few buttons.

In order to record the screen, we will have to give the program where we want to save our video first. We can do that by entering the file name in 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.

Once we’ve specified the output filename, we have to choose which format we want to save our video in. The most common format is MKV, which was pre-selected, but if you prefer another format (such as MP4 or AVI), you can do so by clicking the drop-down menu right below the text box.

Next up, we can check / uncheck the Record Microphone, Record Video boxes to record the video and sound from the microphone. We can record the mouse pointer as well by checking Show Mouse. If you’re recording just a small part of the screen, selecting Follow Mouse will make that screen area always move with the mouse pointer.

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 Green Recorder on Ubuntu

Update 2022 : The project is now abandoned, you may want to check out Blue Recorder, which is an actively maintained fork of Green Recorder.

Green Recorder is not available in Ubuntu official repositories, which is added by default. So in order to have it installed on your system, you must add its repository first. Double-check your settings to make sure that your system’s multiverse and universe repositories are enabled before trying to install the program from the PPA using the commands below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mhsabbagh/greenproject
sudo apt update
sudo apt install green-recorder

For other Linux distribution, you can download source code and install the dependencies on your distribution (gir1.2-appindicator3, gawk, python-gobject, python-urllib3, x11-utils, ffmpeg). Once that’s done, install Green Recorder using the command below.

sudo python setup.py installCode language: CSS (css)

There are also easier alternative installation method for various operating system, you can find more information at https://github.com/green-project/green-recorder.

Conclusion

We hope that this article helps you discover a suitable desktop screen recorder for your workflow. If you are interested in post-process your video file, you may want to check out or list of The Best Linux Video Converters. You may also be interested in our round-up of the best youtube-dl GUIs for you guys who want to avoid using the commands.

If you have any questions, then please feel free to ask in the comments below.

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