phnerg

A tool to record your desktop to a timestamp-named matroska file with lossless dirac and flac codecs, with optional draggable camera-mirror during recording, as efficiently as possible.

This is most useful when you want low-resource-consuming lossless realtime recording for later editing and/or high-quality lossy compression using multiple passes, as opposed to mediocre realtime lossy compression and/or generational loss due to lossy de/encoding when editing. Due to that (and using ffmpeg for grabbing, minimal python/gtk for launching cvlc camera-mirror) it uses minimal resources and reduces the risk of dropped frames.

webm container format was not used as it only supports lossy audio codecs (vorbis and opus). As webm is just a subset/profile of matroska, I attempted encoding vp9 (webm's best video codec) in lossless-mode with flac audio to matroska, but had many obscure problems with creation and viewing, so have stuck with dirac for video for now.

Quick Start

• Copy phnerg to somewhere in your $PATH
• If you intend to use the camera-mirror functionality (default):
  • Ensure python3 is installed
  • Copy camera-mirror to the same directory as phnerg
• edit both files to modify the ## EDIT THESE variables to your liking
• run phnerg with any of the following args if you need them:
  • dual: record dual-screen instead of just primary
  • mono: record single audio channel instead of stereo
  • nocamera: don't launch a camera-mirror
  • noscale: don't scale the image down, use native resolution (generally this will create enormous files)

License

Copyright © 2017 Rowan Thorpe rowan@rowanthorpe.com

phnerg uses the GPLv3 license, check the COPYING file.

Any additional contributions are noted in the AUTHORS.md file.

Tips

• If doing CPU-intensive stuff while recording on a laptop, you may need to either use an external microphone placed at least a few inches away from it (or mute your microphone if you don't need to record external sound) to avoid the sound of the fans drowning out other sound.
• camera-mirror can be run standalone (just run it from the commandline with no args).