The Big List Of Screenrecording Software (Linux Edition)
If you are looking for decent programs to record games you have come to the right place!
In case you are also looking for video editing software to trim, convert and edit your recording consider to check out The Big List Of Video Editors.
Note: I haven’t tested these programs personally (except Krut because there is also a Windows port for it) but after a little research i noticed that the following programs were used and recommended by many Linux users.
I have also created a list about Screenrecorders for Windows and Mac.
Krut
“Krut is a screencast tool that is written in Java and well suited for making video tutorials (instructional videos) on most platforms. Krut records movie files, including sound, of selected parts of your screen. The files use the quicktime mov format. The program has an intuitive and compact user interface.”
recordMyDesktop
Download
“recordMyDesktop is a desktop session recorder for that attemps to be easy to use, yet also effective at it’s primary task.
As such, the program is separated in two parts; a simple command line tool that performs the basic tasks of capturing and encoding and an interface that exposes the program functionality in a usable way.
GLC
“GLC records OpenGL games = Linux alternative to Fraps”
FFmpeg
“FFmpeg is a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec – the leading audio/video codec library.”
Xvidcap
“Xvidcap is a tool that can capture movement on an X11 display. It works in two distinct modes: It can capture to single frames (like a number of jpeg images) or it can encode the captured frames to a video on-line.”
Kazam
“Kazam is a simple screen recording program that will capture the content of your screen and record a video file that can be played by any video player that supports VP8/WebM video format.”
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I’ve tried Xvidcap, RecordMyDesktop, and FFMPEG, and there’s a couple things I’d like to point out:
-Xvidcap seems to increase the playback rate of the output video as it drops frames (since it’s just putting the frames it captures into a video, anyway). This gets quite annoying, as for more graphics-intensive programs, the video can be several times faster than the recording. No sound is another con.
-RecordMyDesktop is fairly decent. In KDE here there’s a nice GUI called RecordItNow (and GNOME, LXDE, etc have their own variants) that is very nice and simple to use. Some of the default settings are obnoxious, but if you know what you’re doing, you can do stuff fine. For me, though, it can only record at reasonable framerates for very graphically simple programs at low resolutions.
-FFMPEG is what I use. There are probably some good GUI’s for it, but I just run it from the command-line with a small shell script I ripped from the interwebs. It does a really decent job on most games I’ve tested it on, with some artifacts and tearing on 3D games running in high resolutions. Only problems I have with it are that the audio seems to be slightly out of sync (might be a setting someplace I’m missing), and recording at high resolutions on graphics-intensive games.
Thanks for the list. I’ll be checking some of these out, since I’m always on the lookout for good screen capturing programs.
Mark
October 25, 2011
Mark, thank you very much for taking the time to review these screenrecorders! :)
You said that FFMPEG is good but you have some problems with demanding games. (Maybe GLC will give you better results with these games).
PixelProspector
October 25, 2011
Yes, after a bit of testing, it seems that GLC works perfectly. Thank you!
Oh, and I also figured out that “-async 1″ was the setting I was missing in FFMPEG. Works great now.
Mark
October 26, 2011
[...] and some additional information: • Links to reviews of various capture software on Mac, PC and Linux from Pixel Prospector • Link to a great article on indiegames.com on What makes an effective game [...]
How to make awesome indie game trailers |
June 11, 2012
I’ve found another: Kazam https://launchpad.net/kazam Personally I found it better than GLC
.teri
July 15, 2012
Just added it to the list.
Thanks for the tip :)
PixelProspector
July 17, 2012
I have used kazzam to record minecraft and other things and it give an extreme amount of lag on a computer that has six gig of ram and without the screen recorder runs fine. It actually lagged my computer so much that I could not turn off the recording. I will try some of the others though.
Ian
May 12, 2013