GNOME Shell’s built-in screen recording feature is perfect at capturing short clips but when you need to record longer sessions you should use a dedicated screen recording app.
Such tools give you greater control over video quality, output format, sound capture, frame rate, and so on — all vitally important if you’re looking to create high-quality screencast content for videos, social media, or really helpful bug reports.
Amongst the surfeit of Linux screen recording software that’s readily available is Blue Recorder.
Blue Recorder Linux screen recording app
Blue Recorder 0.2.0 running in Fedora 39
Blue Recorder is a revamped edition of Green Recorder, a former open-source screen recording tool using FFMPEG, gaining popularity between 2017-19 but is no longer being developed.
The most recent version of Blue Recorder has been released on Flathub and the Snap Store. It highlights a GTK4 overhaul of the entire user interface, bestowing the tool with a subtle visual makeover. Though the structure largely stays the same as its predecessor, the porting process opens doors for potential future enhancements.
Features of Blue Recorder include:
- Capability to record audio and video under Wayland on GNOME or KDE
- Recordings can be saved in formats such as MKV, AVI, MP4, WMV, WEBM, GIF, & NUT
- Option to choose the audio input source from a given list
- Ability to record the entire screen, a specific window, or a selected region
- Inclusion of various mouse options
- Option to adjust frame rates
A few notes (I did look at the project GitHub but couldn’t find specific info on these): the app doesn’t seem to support PipeWire yet, as the audio selector inside the app only mentions PulseAudio; region recording is greyed under Wayland; and recording to WebM results in blank files.
These aren’t necessarily showstoppers, mind.
Install Blue Recorder
You can get install the latest version of Blue Recorder from Flathub, or install it from the Canonical Snap Store but v0.2.0 is only in the edge channel at the time of writing and does require the --dev-mode flag to be passed in order to actually install it on Ubuntu.
Source code is available on GitHub.