High performance wlroots based screen recorder. Uses dma-buf transfers to get surface, and uses the GPU to do both the pixel format conversion and the encoding, making it about as performant as you could hope.

Should work well on Intel and AMD GPUs. It also might work on desktop Nvidia GPUs with libva-vdpau-driver, but it seems like vaapi doesn't work on laptop Nvidia GPUs. However, many of these systems have Intel GPUs as well, which work great.

Open an issue if something is not working, I'm happy to take a look.

(relatively unscientific) benchmark setup:

• 4kp60 display
• i9-11900H CPU/GPU
• vkcube running on screen, as both wf-recorder and wl-screenrec don't copy/encode frames when there is no difference

Additionally, with either wf-recorder setup there is visible stuttering in the vkcube window. wl-screenrec does not seem to stutter at all.

However, it does come at the cost of using slightly more GPU. Those number seem stable and I hypothesize that they are statistically significant, but still not a huge change.

paru -S wl-screenrec-git

Or, manually:

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/wl-screenrec-git.git
cd wl-screenrec-git
makepkg -si

Install ffmpeg, which is a required dependency.

cargo install --git https://github.com/russelltg/wl-screenrec

Capture entire output:

wl-screenrec         # valid when you only have one output
wl-screenrec -o DP-1 # specify outuput

Capture region:

wl-screenrec -g "$(slurp)"    # use slurp
wl-screenrec -g "0,0 128x128" # manual region

• Cannot capture a region that spans more than one display. This is probably possible but quite difficult, espeicially with potential differences in refresh rate. Probably will never be supported.