Introduction
Most normies use OBS Studio as a screen recorder. And that's fine, it's a great program. But for us minimalist zoomers, OBS is way too much bloat. After dumpster diving I have found the based screen recorders, for Xorg and Wayland.
Why Am I Making This?
It's simple — lots of people can't get OBS working. OBS is laggy, bloated, and just bad. With these minimalist screen recorders, however, you can have some shell scripting fun and a fast screen recording experience.
Xorg - FFMPEG
Probably the best screen recording tool ever, because it's more than just a screen recorder. You can do all sorts of stuff with ffmpeg and tweak every little thing.
I'm even pretty sure OBS is just a GUI wrapper for ffmpeg :) It’s fast, minimal, and “Just Works.”
You’d combine it with x11grab to get your screen capture. For FFMPEG, scripting is necessary to get things working properly.
You can even pop up a webcam window with ffmpeg if you want to!
Wayland - wl-screenrec
I just recently came across this one. It's written in Rust (I don’t mind the language—except when it’s Python). It uses GPU hardware acceleration too. It works without a script, but scripting it is the ideal way to use it. Here’s the script I’m using:
wl-screenrec script:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -e # Stop on error
echo "Starting Screen Record"
echo "Press Ctrl+C to stop recording..."
timestamp="$(date +"recording-%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S")"
output="${timestamp}.mp4"
final_output="${timestamp}-final.mp4"
# Start recording
wl-screenrec --audio --filename "$output"
# Boost audio
ffmpeg -i "$output" -filter:a "volume=3dB" "$final_output"
# Clean up original
rm "$output"
echo "Done. Output saved as $final_output"
Conclusion
Do not use OBS — use these minimalist, based programs instead!