Attention!
The Green Recorder project is discontinued and it is no longer developed. You should not use it anymore. Try using SimpleScreenRecorder instead.
A new version of the Linux screen recorder, Green Recorder has been released. Green Recorder 3.0 which is built using Python, FFmpeg and GTK+3 comes along with many new features and updates.
Green Recorder: A screen recorder for Linux

Green Recorder is a simple desktop recorder for Linux distributions. You can use it to record audio and video on almost every Linux interface. Released under GPL 3, it now also supports Wayland.
Green Recorder 3.0 supports avi, mkv, mp4 nut and gif. Wayland’s GNOME session supports only WebM. The user can choose the audio input source from a list as well as can set default values from the preference window.

It has a D-Bus API that is used to connect to the GNOME Shell inbuilt screencasting tool used to record videos. An instance of FFmpeg is launched in the background when recording audio. The two files are then merged into the WebM file when recording is finished.
As for GIF format, Green Recorder records the video as a raw video and then generates the GIF image from it. This lets you have an optimized GIF image size that is better than the normal FFmpeg recording. For Xorg audio and video, it uses FFmpeg.

By default, Green Recorder uses the V8 encoder on Wayland only. This is because of the CPU and RAM consumption issue with the V9 encoder in GNOME Shell.
[irp posts=”15960″ name=”Best GIF Recorder Tools For Linux In 2017″]
New Features in Green Recorder 3.0
Below is a list of some of the updates and new features published in the release.
- GIF format support is now available! The image size is more optimized and better than the normal FFmpeg recording with GIF.
- Ability to choose the audio input source.
- Preferences window added to allow setting default values. The default Wayland pipeline can now be edited from there.
- The graphical user interface has been reorganized
- A play button has been added to easily enable playing the recorded video. This depends on xdg-open.
- An improved FFmpeg detection on Xorg
- Introduced a better detection method for the running display server, adding the possibility to support other servers in the future with no problem.
Installing Green Recorder in Ubuntu based Linux distributions
If you have the old Green Recorder and need to upgrade, you will need to add another PPA for the old Green Recorder PPA is no longer used to distribute updates.
Green Recorder 3.0 can be installed from the following PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fossproject/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo apt install green-recorder
Installing Green Recorder in other Linux distributions
You can find the installation instructions for other Linux distributions as well as the source code on the GitHub repository of Green Recorder:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
green-recorder : Depends: python-urllib3 but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
Does anybody know how to install green-recorder on Ununtu 20.04 ?
The project is no longer developed and should not be used anymore. You may use SimpleScreenRecorder or Kazam.
Thanks! I’ve installed SimpleScreenRecorder
How to install it on Fedora?
How is this better or different than my current SimpleScreenRecorder?
Well.. for one, it works on Wayland while SimpleScreenRecorder doesn’t ;)
Wayland for me is useless, not least because you can’t run Synaptic Package Manager. My preferred alternatives are VokoScreen recorder and the Gnome Shell extension Screen recorder
Nice App, thanks for the sharing. I always create screencast with a web-based software calls Acethinker Screen Recorder, It is an online tool that lets you record your screen right from the browser. Share it here as an alternative to green recorder.
Mint 17.3
The package request the installation of
python-pydbus mais il n’est pas installable
ffmpeg (>= 3.0) mais il n’est pas installable
It seems that there are some dependencies that are not installed on your system. You may try to install them first.
Yes but my Mint does not like him it seems :
13:00:[email protected]:~$ sudo apt-get install python-pydbus
Lecture des listes de paquets… Fait
Construction de l’arbre des dépendances
Lecture des informations d’état… Fait
Aucune version du paquet python-pydbus n’est disponible, mais il existe dans la base
de données. Cela signifie en général que le paquet est manquant, qu’il est devenu obsolète
ou qu’il n’est disponible que sur une autre source
E: Le paquet « python-pydbus » n’a pas de version susceptible d’être installée
13:00:[email protected]:~$
Try:
sudo apt install pip
sudo pip install pydbus
‘pip’ does not install however ‘python-pip’ is installed then pydbus is correcty installed with the ‘sudo pip install pydbus’, but still failing :( :
12:02:[email protected]:~$ sudo pip install pydbus
Downloading/unpacking pydbus
Downloading pydbus-0.6.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Installing collected packages: pydbus
Successfully installed pydbus
Cleaning up…
12:05:[email protected]:~$ sudo apt install green-recorder
Lecture des listes de paquets… Fait
Construction de l’arbre des dépendances
Lecture des informations d’état… Fait
Certains paquets ne peuvent être installés. Ceci peut signifier
que vous avez demandé l’impossible, ou bien, si vous utilisez
la distribution unstable, que certains paquets n’ont pas encore
été créés ou ne sont pas sortis d’Incoming.
L’information suivante devrait vous aider à résoudre la situation :
Les paquets suivants contiennent des dépendances non satisfaites :
green-recorder : Dépend: python-pydbus mais il n’est pas installable
Dépend: ffmpeg (>= 3.0) mais il n’est pas installable
E: Impossible de corriger les problèmes, des paquets défectueux sont en mode « garder en l’état ».
12:05:[email protected]:~$