wf-recorder is a utility program for screen recording of wlroots-based compositors (more specifically, those that support wlr-screencopy-v1 and xdg-output). Its dependencies are ffmpeg, wayland-client and wayland-protocols.
Arch users can install wf-recorder from the Community repo.
pacman -S wf-recorder
Artix users can install wf-recorder from the official repos
pacman -S wf-recorder
Void users can install wf-recorder from the official repos
xbps-install -S wf-recorder
Fedora users can install from rpmfusion-free-updates. First enable rpmfusion and then
sudo dnf install wf-recorder
sudo apt install libavutil-dev libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev libpulse-dev
$ sudo dnf install wayland-devel wayland-protocols-devel ffmpeg-devel
git clone https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder.git && cd wf-recorder
meson build --prefix=/usr --buildtype=release
ninja -C build
Optionally configure with -Ddefault_codec='codec'. The default is libx264. Now you can just run ./build/wf-recorder or install it with sudo ninja -C build install.
Optionally install scdoc, a tool by ddevault, for building the manpage.
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.
Use -f <filename> to specify the output file. In case of multiple outputs, you'll first be prompted to select the output you want to record. If you know the output name beforehand, you can use the -o <output name> option.
To select a specific part of the screen you can either use -g <geometry>, or use slurp for interactive selection of the screen area that will be recorded:
wf-recorder -g "$(slurp)"
You can record screen and sound simultaneously with
wf-recorder --audio --file=recording_with_audio.mp4
To specify a codec, use the -c <codec> option. To modify codec parameters, use -p <option_name>=<option_value>.
To set a specific output format, use the --muxer option. For example, to output to a video4linux2 loopback you might use:
wf-recorder --muxer=v4l2 --codec=rawvideo --file=/dev/video2
To use GPU encoding, use a VAAPI codec (for ex. h264_vaapi) and specify a GPU device to use with the -d option:
wf-recorder -f test-vaapi.mkv -c h264_vaapi -d /dev/dri/renderD128
Some drivers report support for rgb0 data for vaapi input but really only support yuv planar formats. In this case, use the -t or --force-yuv option in addition to the vaapi options to convert the data to yuv planar data before sending it to the GPU.
The -e option attempts to use OpenCL if wf-recorder was built with OpenCL support and -t or --force-yuv are specified, even without vaapi GPU encoding. Use -e# or --opencl=# to use a specific OpenCL device, where # is one of the devices listed.