In my spare time I volunteer as a digital literacy trainer in our local library. Recently I put together a training wiki that featured a number of YouTube videos on a variety of topics including word processing. I could not find exactly what I wanted to introduce my students to LibreOffice so I decided I would create my own. I considered a number of options for doing that but finally setttled on “Simple Screen Recorder” which is an open source software released on the GPL3 license. I liked it because unlike the other programs I had considered it had a very simple interface but produced high quality video files which I could easily upload to YouTube and then share in my wiki. “SimpleScreenRecorder” allows a user to capture the whole screen or just a self selected rectangle. Files can be saved as Matroska, Ogg, WebM and MP4.
I liked “SimpleScreenRecorder” because it was so easy to use and it provided exactly what I was looking for. I have used other proprietary screen capture programs which cost a hundred dollars and more while not providing a more intuitive interface. “Simple Screen Recorder” has a number of features that I liked including: graphical interface; the ability to record an entire screen or just a portion of it; synchronization of audio and video; pause and resume and the use of hot-keys for starting and ending recordings.
I installed it using instructions provided on their website. They provide instructions for Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Slackware, OpenSuse and others. I also found RPMs that allow it to be installed on Fedora. Once installed the user opens a terminal and enters “simplescreenrecorder” on the command line and the program starts. After a welcome screen the user is presented with some very simple choices about area to be recorded. I chose a rectangle and could easily select it with a “cross-hair” type selection tool. At the next screen I was presented with choices of the name of my recorded file along with the format. I chose MP4 for video and MP3 for audio and then I began my recording. The source code for Simple Screen Recorder can be found at, https://github.com/MaartenBaert/ssr.
Here is a short YouTube video I created with “Simple Screen Recorder” to demonstrate how easy the program is to use. You can report bugs and submit feature requests on GitHub: https://github.com/MaartenBaert/ssr/issues or if you don’t have a GitHub account you can send requests directly to Maarten Baert via email.