What is this?

This is a simple screen recorder written in Rust for Wayland Linux Desktop Environments.

It uses hardware acceleration to encode the video frames using the GPU, Opus as the audio encoder and the end goal is to have this behave similar to applications like Medal.tv or Nvidia's Shadowplay feature where this runs in the background while you play and you can use a keybind to clip the last [X] seconds of gameplay.

Currently it offers video and audio capture when ran and exports the capture into an mp4 file all using ffmpeg.

Use busctl --user call com.rust.WayCap /com/rust/WayCap com.rust.WayCap SaveClip to invoke the save command.

Core features

• Asks permission from user to record their screen (Wayland limitation).
• Captures video using pipewire.
• Captures audio using pipewire.
• On dbus command, saves what it has captures to a .mp4 file.
• Uses GPU to encode frames to reduce CPU overhead. (Supports NVIDIA with h264.nvenc and AMD with h264.vaapi)
• Customize certain options via an user level config file in ~/.config
• Automatic game detection.
• Front end GUI for customizing settings.

Known bugs/things I plan to implement

1. Game detection by using something like procfs and a known list of games.
2. This should be a background daemon that should auto start with systemd.
3. Front end GUI for settings
4. Normal recording/manual execution can stay instead of only for games?

Notes

By default this will try to use h264_vaapi as it can support AMD/Nvidia/Intel. It is recommended to use nvenc if you have an nvidia GPU by updating the configuration file.

Configuration

Currently, this program only supports configurations via a config.toml file in ~/.config/waycap/

The application will automatically create a default one for you if it is not present. This is what it looks like

encoder = "h264_vaapi" # h264_nvenc | h264_vaapi
max_seconds = 300 # 5 minutes is the default but can be anything -- be aware this can have impact on performance as this grows bigger
use_mic = false # true | false
quality = "MEDIUM" # LOW | MEDIUM | HIGH | ULTRA -- impacts file size and can impact performance

The comments are the available options.

You can also update the config via dbus call with the following

ENCODER=h264_vaapi
MAX_SECONDS=300
USE_MIC=false
QUALITY=medium
busctl --user call com.rust.WayCap /com/rust/WayCap com.rust.WayCap UpdateConfig '(subs)' $ENCODER $MAX_SECONDS $USE_MIC $QUALITY

Minimum Requirement

• NVIDIA GPU with CUDA capabilities or AMD GPU with mesa drivers
• Wayland as your communication server for your desktop environment.
• Rust/Cargo installation link to build the project.

Installation Guide

Clone this repository via

git clone https://github.com/Adonca2203/WayCap.git

Build the project (debug build) via

cd WayCap
cargo build

Usage Guide

You can run the application as a debug build via

cargo run

from within your cloned project's directory.

The program will prompt you to select the screen you would like to share with the application, select the appropriate display option/

Play games and have fun

Whenever you want to clip, open up another terminal and run

busctl --user call com.rust.WayCap /com/rust/WayCap com.rust.WayCap SaveClip

Alternatively, bind the above busctl call to a keybind with something like sxhkd

Find the moment in the clip you want and trim the video using the helper script

FILE_NAME=
START_TIME=
END_TIME=

./clip.sh -i $FILE_NAME -s $START_TIME -e $END_TIME -o output.mp4