I had previously come across the EasyScreenCast extension. It makes recording video very convenient, but the settings are fairly limited, and it only works on Gnome 3.x desktops, so it has some obvious restrictions.
While watching videos on YouTube, I noticed a well-made Linux desktop recording done under Gnome. There was no EasyScreenCast icon visible, so it was probably captured with something else. After asking about it, I found out it was SimpleScreenRecorder.
Homepage: http://www.maartenbaert.be/simplescreenrecorder/
GitHub: https://github.com/MaartenBaert/ssr
Judging by the name, it sounds like a very simple utility—and it is. The interface is straightforward and easy to use, but the feature set is surprisingly strong.
Installation instructions are available on the project's homepage. What stood out to me was that I couldn't find a Fedora package there, which is somewhat unusual.
That said, it wasn't a major problem. The required packages are available on GitHub, and the build process itself is not complicated. I did try compiling it, but dependency checking failed, apparently because of GLib. After some quick searching, I still didn't get it sorted out, and since this involved desktop-related components, I really didn't feel like spending too much time wrestling with it.
So I looked for another approach and eventually ran into a repository from FDZH. It contains quite a lot of software, and efforts like that really deserve appreciation.
Installing SimpleScreenRecorder on Fedora 23
Add the repository:
wget http://repo.fdzh.org/FZUG/FZUG.repo -P /etc/yum.repos.d/
Refresh the package cache:
dnf makecache
Install it:
dnf install simplescreenrecorder
In actual use, the program is quite capable. It supports formats such as mkv, mp4, webm, and ogg. You can choose exactly which area of the screen to record, preview the capture, pause during recording, and use hotkeys as well.
