Blue-Recorder, a Simple Screen Recorder Written in Rust | Hacker News Reader

Blue-Recorder, a Simple Screen Recorder Written in Rust

github.com

96 pointsalexzeitler51 comments

What are the benefits of „Written in Rust“ here? As far as I understand this is basically a GUI for FFMPEG, which is written in C. Is it just marketing?

There seems to be a trend of people building frontends to already existing tools, then advertising their software as though it was itself implementing the underlying functionality.

You built this?

...

I built this.

Considering the original tool was abandoned, I think its fair game. They also noted they made some improvements over the original tool. I assume the author wanted a simple tool like the original but found some bugs, dug into the code, realized he could re-write it in what he was comfortable in.

When was FFMpeg ever abandoned?

What? I'm talking specifically about the GUI itself.

...which is a frontend to FFMpeg's functionality, not a screen recorder in its own right.

Right, and GUIs dont have GUI specific bugs ever? Thats what you seem to be implying, or the underlying dependency becomes incompatible.

People always say this, and I get it - maybe it feels like an attempt to ride a hype train.

But if you're interested in Rust ecosystem, you're probably interested in how someone wraps FFMPEG in rust, and so that tag might be valuable. Maybe we can tag projects based on languages, and help avoid this.

Isn’t that already a thing? Or do you mean that HN should add tags for posts about languages?

Someone (may have been Julia Evans) discussed how easier it is to hit the front page if you add "in xxx" to your title.

"xxx" being the current hyped technology. She mentioned Go and Rust as examples

In Scratch

I opened to project to take a look at the source code, which I would not have done if the project were written in, say, C.

Same - it seems like a decent, small, example of using gtk4 bindings in rust. These kinds of projects are great particularly for anyone comfortable in C and building up fluency in rust.

Also might be easier to build than a C project.

Yeah but the majority of the useful functionality of the program is written in C (gtk4, ffmpeg).

It just seems descriptive, I don't think there's any implication of a particular benefit. More description = more reason to click on link.

The benefits of "written in Rust" are that it never segfaults.

Wrapping C in Rust gives no such guarantee. FFmpg can segfault.

Yes but as more stuff is written in Rust, we'll have fewer segfaults.

...only if rustc itself remains bug free

And the unsafe parts of... Numerous crates and even the stdlib

I thought your original post was a joke? "Never" is an exaggeration, and overselling Rust like that makes people think it's just hype.

"Written in Rust" grants +4 trustworthiness, +4 ability to write a blog post on memory safety and 2% resistance to ego loss at the cost of -5 alertness and -3 O.G. street cred points

I would put "for Linux" rather than "written in Rust" in the repository description. One is more important than the other. Priorities.

"written in rust" is a red flag for me. Even if it is better, the fact that the most important feature to advertise is "written in rust" instead of "supports wayland" or something, tells me the developer's priorities are out of whack.

Poor distribution. Snap is cancer, flatpak is crap, no AppImage, no brew package.

actually I enjoy flatpak in gnome

Honestly haven't found a nice video recording UI for wayland. Been using a bash alias with `wf-recorder`. This one doesn't seem to work with Hyprland (wayland) either.

Anyone have any other recommendations?

obs studio is kind of overkill but works well. You can even record several windows individually and have a different layout than what you actually have on screen.

OBS is really pretty straightforward once you get your head around, and it's super flexible. I'd hesitate to even call it overkill, as for simple screen recording you only need to touch a few settings one time. and then it's two clicks for the rest of all time. (One to start recording, one to stop, I even have them keybound).

OBS is intimidating. I found it to be daunting compared to Windows gamebar (Win+G) and MacOS (CMD+Shift+5, pick a mic). The power is worth the pain if you need it. Yet I don't recommend it to normies.

Of course Wayland is usually Linux so users are often more technical anyway.

I use simplescreenrecorder on X.

Every time I hear Rust, I recall True Detective (Rustin Cohle).

Well, you know what he said about time ...

Yeah, he said it is a flatulence circle.

hangs on arch/kde

> with support for Wayland display server on GNOME session

It may only work on gnome...

> It may only work on gnome...

Which already has an integrated screen recorder that works fairly well.

The GNOME screen recorder works the best out of all the ones I've tried. It allows you to record a selected part of the screen as well, which Blue Recorder doesn't

> which Blue Recorder doesn't

Whats the function of the "Select an Area" button in this screenshot then? https://github.com/xlmnxp/blue-recorder/blob/master/screensh...

Probably for Xorg maybe? It doesn't work for me in Wayland

Looking at the source code, this ui can handle x11 or wayland, but wayland can only do window recording or monitor recording, for x11 it's all just handed over to ffmpeg which can handle x,y,width,height input variables.

Interesting. On wlroots compositors, it is easier to capture a region than a window, so many screen recording tools that target wlroots (for example wl-recorder) support regions but not windows.

A few weeks ago, I tried Blue Recorder just because Gnome's Screen Recorder gave out some static when recording a certain area. IIRC, in Blue Recorder I can't even do recording a selected area, maybe because I am on wayland.

My thoughts exactly. I'm on sway / wlroots for years and don't know how people put up with wl-recorder. GNOME's screen recorder works so much better.

Gnome's integrated screen recorder for wayland didn't arrive until 2022 IIRC.

Blue-recorder, green-recorder (https://github.com/mhsabbagh/green-recorder), etc. were around to fill in the gap at the time and may still be useful for special cases.

I haven't tried it, but looking at the code, it talks to xdp to setup the screencast session and then gstreamer with the pipewiresrc to record it. It should work on any compositor with an xdp implementation that supports the Screencast protocol. KDE's does.

Are you sure it hangs and doesn't just show a dialog somewhere for you to select which screen to cast / give it permission to screencast?

Yes I get an icon but no window

As in it hangs when you launch it, not that it launches successfully but then hangs when you press the Record button? Probably a more fundamental windowing problem than the screencasting interface interaction then.

yeah it hangs on launch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com