1.9 KiB
| layout | title | categories | date |
|---|---|---|---|
| post | Lossless screen recording | minimalism | 2018-08-12 17:15:20 |
NEVER USE OBS AGAIN
I've been trying off and on for the past few weeks to figure out how to record my 1920x1080 monitor. The recording is going to be some music videos for a friend. Originally, it was just going to be a single background image for the whole video then I had the idea of using cava in a transparent terminal on top of the background. This didn't work at all because it actually kept freezing when I tried to record it. So I tried switching to ncmpcpp visualiser. This still had horrible lag. So I've been puzzling over how to use ffmpeg to losslessly record my second monitor. I finally figured it out and have pasted the command below.
ffmpeg -video_size 1920x1080 -framerate 30 -f x11grab -draw_mouse 0 -i :0.0+1366,0 -c:v libx264 -crf 0 -preset ultrafast output.mkv
This is the exact command I used; I'll modify it so you know what to edit for your use-case 😉
ffmpeg -video_size <target-resolution> -framerate 30 -f x11grab -i :0.0+<width-of-unused-monitor>,0 -c:v libx264 -crf 0 -preset ultrafast <filename>.mkv
If you do not want the cursor recorded, add -draw_mouse 0 directly after x11grab like I did in the first command.
My video was 470mb for a ~13 minute video. If you're going to archive the recording or are concerned about file size, re-encode it losslessly but with a slower preset. As the initial recording was lossless and the re-encode is lossless too, there will be no absolutely no loss is quality . . . anywhere. I also highly recommend using this as a general purpose screen recorder if you have a low-end system. Previously, I was using OBS and the lag in the video was incredible but with ffmpeg, it's smooth as butter. The command for re-encoding is below:
ffmpeg -i output.mkv -c:v libx264 -crf 0 -preset veryslow output-smaller.mkv