Simple Screen Recorder Review – The Best Video Recording App for Games on Linux

very good
key review info
application features
  • Faster than VLC and ffmpeg/avconv
  • (3 more, see all...)

Linux is now also a gaming platform, so naturally, people will want to record their gaming sessions. This is not easily done on Linux, but there are some ways to do it. SimpleScreenRecorder is probably the best of them, but the competition is getting fierce.

If you are a Windows gamer, then you already know what some of the applications available are if you want to record your experience. Fraps is just one of them, but there is no alternative for Linux users with the same amount of features. Recording the desktop is not an issue and it's done easily enough, but recording an OpenGL window is much more difficult.

The good news is that we’re getting there, especially now that there are almost 1,000 games on the Steam for Linux. The ability to record video while playing them has become much more important, and fortunately, SimpleScreenRecorde is here to help. Some of the features are still experimental and the application is under active development.

Installation

We tested the application in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, but it's available for Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 15.04 (which hasn't been released just yet). The developer provides a PPA, so it's extremely easy to install. Just add the PPA to the system by entering the following commands in a terminal:

code
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:maarten-baert/simplescreenrecorder
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install simplescreenrecorder
sudo apt-get install simplescreenrecorder-lib:i386
Interestingly enough, the last command is there to add some very important libraries to the system that would allow users to record 32-bit apps on 64-bit systems, a setup which is actually quite common.

If you have another system than Ubuntu, you don't have to worry. There are ways to install it on Arch Linux, Gentoo, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Slackware, or NixOS. It's also possible to compile the source, which is available from GitHub.

Usage

If you don't need to record a game, then things are pretty straightforward and there are a ton of applications that can do that simple job. This is where SimpleScreenRecorder comes to the rescue. It's able to record pretty much all OpenGL sessions, and that's all that you can ask from it, although it has other options.

The app has only a three windows where all the preferences reside, so it's not difficult to use. As per the developers instructions, the default options are usually the right ones, so if you don't know what something does, then you shouldn't change it.

Users have the ability to record the entire screen (a resolution can be provided), record a fixed rectangle, record only where the cursor is going, or record OpenGL apps. This can be a tricky business, but you'll have to read the "The Bad" section to know why is that.

It's also possible to define the framerate at which the recording is being done and to scale the video to another resolution than the one available natively. It's worth mentioning that the application can be made to ignore the mouse cursor, which is actually a nice feature. There is also an option to record without audio or to change the audio input (ALSA, Pulsaudio, and so on).

Users can choose from a wide variety of formats to export their session, they can choose the codec for that procedure, and they can also tweak a couple of other values.


The Good

Users can store profiles with the settings they have created, so they don't have to make the same modifications every time they open the application. Also, the fact that they can choose the file format for export is a nice feature and something that apps on other platforms would love to have.

The Bad

We can't really hold anything against it since this is still under development. There doesn't seem to be anything missing from the application, with the exception of an FPS counter, but it's impossible to know how difficult it would be to implement that.

We mentioned earlier that OpenGL might be tricky. The procedure requires the app to inject a library into the application that's being recorded, so it's technically possible that the game will think that you're using a hack. This means that the user might get banned. You really need to check if this is OK before trying to record with it, especially in online games.

Conclusion

SimpleScreenRecorder is a powerful app that sets itself apart from the myriad of application that can record the desktop on the Linux platform. It's one of the few that take aim at the gaming community and it's already an excellent solution. We can only hope that the developer will continue to improve it.

user interface 4
features 4
ease of use 5
pricing / value 5


final rating 4
Editor's review
very good
 
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SimpleScreenRecorder
SimpleScreenRecorder optionsSimpleScreenRecorder openGL settingsSimpleScreenRecorder outputSimpleScreenRecorder start recording
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