SimpleScreenRecorder For Linux

SimpleScreenRecorder is a simple, free and open source software project that delivers a graphical application for recording programs and games under a GNU/Linux operating system. It can be considered as an alternative to Fraps, a Windows program that lets users record gaming sessions or full screen, 3D applications.

As its name suggests, SimpleScreenRecorder aims to be as simple and easy-to-use as possible, but with the time, it received a wide range of features that transformed it into a powerful Linux desktop screen recorder utility. It is much faster than the FFmpeg/avconv combination or VLC.

Key features include an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), support for recording only a selected area of the screen or the entire root window, support for recording OpenGL applications, support for synchronizing video and audio streams, support for pausing and resuming recordings, useful recording statistics (bitrate, actual frame rate, total recording time and file size), as well as support for previews.

The software is fully multithreaded and outputs smoother video files if used on a computer with multiple CPUs, but it can also run on low-end machines by reducing the video frame rate. It makes use of the FFmpeg and libav libraries for encoding recordings to desire format, supporting all the important video codecs. Live streaming is also possible with SimpleScreenRecorder.

Looking under the hood of SimpleScreenRecorder, we can notice that the program has been written entirely in the C++ programming language and uses the cross-platform Qt GUI toolkit for its graphical user interface. Runtime dependencies include ffmpeg or libav (libavcodec, libswscale, libavutil, libavformat), libX11, libXext, libGL, libXfixes, libGLU, libXi, and ALSA.

Among the officially supported distributions of Linux, we can mention Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Debian, Gentoo, Fedora and openSUSE. The program is also distributed as a source tarball, so you will be able to easily deploy it on any other GNU/Linux operating system as long as the aforementioned requirements are met. Supported architectures include 32-bit and 64-bit.