NAME

wf-recorder — simple screen recording program for wlroots-based compositors

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

wf-recorder is a tool built to record your screen on Wayland compositors. It makes use of wlr-screencopy for capturing video and ffmpeg(1) for encoding it.

In its simplest form, run wf-recorder to start recording and use ‘Ctrl+C’ to stop. This will create a file called ‘recording.mp4’ in the current working directory using the default codec.

The options are as follows:

-a, --audio [DEVICE]

Starts recording the screen with audio.

DEVICE argument is optional. In case you want to specify the PulseAudio device which will capture the audio, you can run this command with the name of that device. You can find your device by running

$ pactl list sources | grep Name

-b, --bframes max_b_frames

Sets the maximum number of B-Frames to use.

-c, --codec

output_codec Specifies the codec of the video. Supports GIF output as well.

To modify codec parameters, use -p option_name=option_value

-d, --device encoding_device

Selects the device to use when encoding the video.

Some drivers report support for ‘rgb0’ data for vaapi input but really only support yuv. Use the -t, --force-yuv option in addition to the vaapi options to convert the data in software, before sending it to the GPU.

-D, --no-damage

By default, wf-recorder will request a new frame from the compositor only when the screen updates. This results in a much smaller output file, which however has a variable refresh rate. When this option is on, wf-recorder does not use this optimization and continuously records new frames, even if there are no updates on the screen.

-f filename.ext

By using the -f option, the output file will have the name filename.ext and the file format will be determined by the provided extension. If the extension is not recognized by your ffmpeg(1) muxers, the command will fail.

You can check the muxers that your ffmpeg(1) installation supports by running

$ ffmpeg -muxers

-F, --filter filter_string

Set the ffmpeg filter to use. VAAPI requires `hwupload,scale_vaapi=nv12` to work.

-g, --geometry screen_geometry

Selects a specific part of the screen. The format is "x,y WxH".

-h, --help

Prints the help screen.

-l, --log

Generates a log on the current terminal. For debug purposes.

-m, --muxer muxer

Set the output format to a specific muxer instead of detecting it from the filename.

-o, --output

Specify the output where the video is to be recorded.

-p, --codec-param [option_name=option_value]

Change the codec parameters.

-t, --force-yuv

Use this option in addition to the vaapi options to convert the data in software, before sending it to the GPU.

-v, --version

Print the version of wf-recorder.

-x, --pixel-format pixel_format

Set the output pixel format.

List available formats using

$ ffmpeg -pix_fmts

EXAMPLES

To select a specific part of the screen you can either use --g geometry or use https://github.com/emersion/slurp for interactive selection of the screen area that will be recorded:

You can record screen and sound simultaneously with

To specify a codec use the -c codec option. To modify codec parameters, -p option_name=option_value.

To set a specific output format, use the -m -muxer option. For example, to output to a v ideo4linux2 loopback you might use:

To use GPU encoding, use a VAAPI codec (for ex. ‘h264_vaapi’ ) and specify a GPU device to use with the -d option:

Some drivers report support for ‘rgb0’ data for ‘vaapi’ input but really only support yuv planar formats. In this case, use the -t, --force-yuv option in addition to the ‘vaapi’ options to convert the data to yuv planar data before sending it to the GPU.

SEE ALSO

ffmpeg(1), pactl(1)