Show HN: A simple recording program with the ability to record the screen | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A simple recording program with the ability to record the screen

github.com

168 pointsakon4774 comments

Congrats on making a small, useful, working tool! I like the minimalism.

Maybe you should mention on your GitHub page that it is for Windows.

In the README: "Windows 10 or newer"

Yes but it's buried down in the `Build` instructions. It should be in the About section: "A simple recording program for Windows with the ability to record screens and audio on your computer." (emphasis mine)

To build it, yes. It never mentions it is for running on Windows.

Don't know why you're being downvoted, I build .NET code in Visual Studio on Windows 10 and execute it on my Raspberry Pi frequently. .NET is certainly not a Windows-only technology.

Yikes! win 10 or newer? Win 10 has screen record, with or without audio, built in.

I'm always looking for quick simple browser based things to suggest to friends, and if there is anything cheaper than corel videostudio (when it's on sale) - for win 8, win 7 - which is my preferred tool for the past so many years.

I do suggest putting win 10 only prominently.

there once 2 people shared their own projects about browser recording plugin which very handy, but I lost the thread and can't find it anymore...

Adding it to the Post title would be great as well.

I think that part is assumed as Gnome/Linux and MacOSX have it built in?

Windows 10 has it built-in too, try Win+Alt+R.

Addendum: It's part of the XBox game bar. In case you are wondering where your recordings are, press Win+G.

It didn't work for me the first time - I had to open the game bar first. Also, I had to focus a Window. I cannot record the full desktop with this technique, so it's not quite the same as the linked application.

Or Win+Shift+S. I think you need to be on a newer Windows 10 release for it to work.

Still not as smooth as on macOS, but getting there.

I believe Win+Shift+S is only for capturing images, not video.

I'm on the latest Windows 10 and I still only see static image capture options.

The Windows 10 screen recorder doesn't let you record Windows Explorer.

What is the built in utility you're using on Linux for this? AFAIK, you need to download a separate utility for recording screens on Linux, or it comes with your desktop environment.

They mentioned it is included with Gnome.

Yeah, hence my mention of "desktop environments" as Gnome is just that. Gnome is not Linux.

I'm not sure Gnome desktop has one built in, but i'm sure most other desktop environments don't.

Gnome does have it built it, for as long as I can remember. Simultaneously press Control-Alt-Shift-R.

KDE seems to have a choice of 3 programs for that on the project, but at least on my Debian they weren't installed by default with the minimum KDE. Maybe they come in the full installation.

MacOS does have this ability via QuickTime, but I wish I could find something that records my screen + audio output. There is are some hacky ways to do this on MacOS, but I haven't found anything super reliable yet. Though, I believe this is more or less intentional by Apple.

The built-in Screenshot.app on macOS can record the screen with audio.

See https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/take-a-screenshot-o...

I checked your link, and even did a "command + f" search. I saw no mentions of the words "audio," "sound," "input", nor "output."

Without some sort of fancy hardware or hacky software, I am not sure if it's possible -- at least not as of 6 or so months ago when I was looking for it.

To test:

Use the link above and try to record the audio of something like a YouTube video while recording the screen playing the video. If you can manage to get this to work, please share your results. I would be so obliged. This is not my goal of the software, but it's a quick test to show you what I am looking for.

A hacky webcam on-screen display can be achieved with https://webrtc.github.io/samples/src/content/getusermedia/re... & right clicking on the video to Picture-in-Picture mode. You can then drag it around where you want while you screen record & it stays on top!

In Debian there is Simple Screen Recorder:

    apt install simplescreenrecorder

I've come to really like peek since it allows to select the rectangle you want to record with minimal interaction. It is also in the Debian repos.

I'm really impressed by Kooha:

https://github.com/SeaDve/Kooha

It allows recording a rectangle/section of the screen, supports Wayland and records to webm by default - which most(?) browsers can play directly.

It's made it trivial to record short how-to videos for helping illustrate how to do something with a web app, or to illustrate visual bugs.

Yep Simple Screen Recorder is my daily driver for recording screencasts. Works perfectly, I really like that you can start/pause/save recording from the systray button.

Nothing I've found works as well as OBS[1]. Everything else I've tried runs into performance problems for certain workloads (games, typically).

[1] https://obsproject.com/

it's in the AUR, too, for those who use arch btw

What I would love would be something that would work in a dashcam mode, constantly storing the preceding n minutes with the option to save parts to file. Useful for example for those times I am testing/debugging a gui app and I trigger a bug but cannot later reproduce.

I've used https://www.realartists.com/retroclip/ on macOS for years and highly recommend. I paid $4.99 when it was released, but it looks like it's available for free now.

Nice to see one exists, it's on windows I'd be needing it though.

I learned about the super useful VokoScreen[1] at HN, so now I'm returning the favor back at HN, for those using Linux (although looks like it also has Windows builds? I didn't know before!)

[1]: https://linuxecke.volkoh.de/vokoscreen/vokoscreen.html

I have been looking for a simple Windows screen recording app over the last few months. This app let me record my screen with audio straight to webm without needing any extra installs or mucking around with config settings.

Thanks for sharing.

So I tried installing it on my barebones Windows 10 box:

First try: "Install C++ resdistributable" Okay...Done

Second try: "Could not find MediaEncoder.dll"

I added the NAudio and SharpDX packages from nuget thinking that might solve it, but no...

Sorry I don't know how to use your software!

Did you by any chance tried to follow the build instructions[1] before trying to build it?

- [1] - https://github.com/akon47/ScreenRecorder#-build

Oh you misunderstand I wasn't building it. I was downloading the package installer. There's an MSI link on the GitHub

Got it. If the installer doesn't work, try building it yourself :)

Haha, oh ok. Nah, how about I just install it? You can build it, tho. Got it? OK :p ;) xx

if you need more options just use ffmpeg directly https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Capture/Desktop

Do you know a easy way, to stop recording via a hotkey?

Because my recorded videos via ffmpeg always had the last seconds showing me how to switch to the terminal and stop by hand, which is more work for editing, which is why I use OBS studio, which I can recommend.

I suppose AutoHotkey would do the job :)

Assigning `killall ffmpeg` to a hotkey does the job.

Hm, I think I tried that and it caused trouble with mp4.

You might have better luck sending SIGINT instead of SIGTERM using 'killall -INT ffmpeg' so that it exits cleanly.

Try ShareX

you may also use hacksaw to select the screenarea to record dynamically

https://github.com/neXromancers/hacksaw#record-an-area-of-th...

I studied the screen capture topic some time ago with video-games. Interestingly, there are also direct APIs for Windows, e.g., https://github.com/bryal/dxgcap-rs

Something a colleague once showed me: if you open PowerPoint and try to add a video to a slide, it also lets you record your screen. You can draw a rectangle anywhere and start recording. Finally, you just save the video and discard the presentation.

Windows has a built in Video Compression optimized for Screen Cast / Screen Capture (See [Windows Media Video Screen][1]). It yields much better results than x264 for this task.

It is used by [FastStone Capture][2].

I wish modern codecs had this as well (A mode optimized for screen casting).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Video#Windows_Me... [2]: https://www.faststone.org/FSCaptureDetail.htm

For those on macOS: the native QuickTime app will record some or all of your screen.

Cmd-Shift-5 offers a streamlined interface

Congrats on building something and posting it!

I usually do so with ffmpeg. The instructions can be found here: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Capture/Desktop

ffmpeg is so powerful that I don't think you need a separate tool for anything that ffmpeg can do. While ffmpeg instructions are a bit more complex, it's just worth learning it.

https://github.com/NickeManarin/ScreenToGif/ older and way more polished project that has the additional bonus of not mixing languages. Its all C# or uses exiting tools like ffmpeg.exe

Everything looks great!

Umm. What's up with the backslashes or forward slashes in the screenshots?

The author of this software is Korean. Japanese and Korean installations of Windows display backslashes "incorrectly" - more info here: https://web.archive.org/web/20060208041008/http://blogs.msdn...

Well that about clears things up! Thank you.

Can it easily record a square section of the screen without recording the full screen? Would be nice to have a program like that equivalent to screenshot tools like flameshot.

This only records the whole screen. You might want to try OBS Studio?

OBS studio is really a good free software!! It has a lot of features and could be a bit intimidating at first but I got nothing but praise for them

I will use OBS for recording tech training sessions. It's a robust app that can be set up for anything I need. I develop open source software in a linux desktop environment, and am thrilled by the capabilities of this program to record my workflow.

I commend the author of this post for creating a simple tool for windows. Anything that helps is capture and share knowledge is a win.

You might want to try ScreenToGif (https://www.screentogif.com/) for Windows and Kap (https://getkap.co/) for macOS.

screentogif is my go-to for windows for anything recording

Why not the built in QuickTime on macOS? It lets you choose a screen section with arbitrary aspect ratio.

Does it offer compression, post-recording resizing and multi-format exports?

I can also recommend licecap (https://www.cockos.com/licecap/), which is quite minimalistic but gets the job done

been using LICEcap for a few years, works perfectly.

ShareX might be what you're looking for.

https://getsharex.com/

This is indeed something I assume people would use a lot. The Windows snipping tool is already pretty neat, but the capability to record video and save as gif/webm would be really helpful.

Are there any technical reason it is not written for net5?

i felt that this was created by the suckless community.

Congrats! Very cool

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