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 is an improved, Rust-based rewrite of Green Recorder, which was an open-source screen recording tool leveraging FFMPEG and popular circa 2017-19 but is no longer under development.
The latest release of Blue Recorder has hit Flathub and the Snap Store. It boasts a GTK4 rewrite of the entire user interface. This gives the utility a minor visual refresh as the layout remains largely the same as before, but the port being done will enable new opportunities for future updates.
Blue Recorder features:
- Recording audio and video under Wayland on GNOME or KDE
- Save recordings to MKV, AVI, MP4, WMV, WEBM, GIF, & NUT
- Select audio input source from a list
- Record whole screen, window, or region
- Mouse options
- Adjust frame rate
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.