Kazam - Linux Desktop Screen Recorder and Broadcaster

Kazam is a simple screen recording program that will capture the content of your screen and record a video file that can be played by any video player that supports VP8/WebM video format. Optionally you can record sound from any sound input device that is supported and visible by PulseAudio.

📌 Please use the latest version kazam 1.5.8. Make sure the version is the latest when you report issues.

📥 Installation

pip install -U kazam

Kazam need some dependency libraries like dbus, cairo to work, in Ubuntu 22.04, you can use the following command to install them:

sudo apt install build-essential libpython3-dev \
    libdbus-1-dev libcairo2-dev libgirepository1.0-dev \
    gir1.2-gudev-1.0 gir1.2-keybinder-3.0 python3-gi python3-gst-1.0 -y

In Ubuntu 20.04, make sure pulseaudio gstream plugin is installed, if not, run:

sudo apt reinstall gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio -y

🧸 Screenshot

💎 Running Kazam

From Source Code

If you want to run Kazam from the source tree, there are a few limitations that you have to take into account. Every icon has to be taken from currently installed icon theme. Toolbars will not show any icons and you will not see Unity AppIndicator.

To run Kazam simply execute te following commands in the source tree:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ cd bin
$ ./kazam

From Command Line

Make sure ~/.local/bin into you PATH, and run kazam in your terminal should work.

🔮 From GUI

If you already have Kazam installed then Kazam icons will be displayed properly.

⌨️ Keyboard shortcuts

SUPER-CTRL-Q - Quit
SUPER-CTRL-W - Show/Hide main window
SUPER-CTRL-R - Start Recording
SUPER-CTRL-F - Finish Recording

In a normal logitech keyboard, SUPER-CTRL is Ctrl+CMD.

💡 Recording Tips

Choose small numerb of framerate. My personal setup is framerate equal to 3. Framerates above 20fps are unlikely to work well because of software and hardware limitations. If you increase framerate and framerate in resulting video drops, that is because encoder can't keep up.

Always do a sound check. Especially if you are recording a live commentary with background sound. I got the best results when I used earphones to listen to the audio while recording. This way your mic will not pick up any audio coming from speakers.

If you _really want loss-less quality, then you will have to record in RAW format. This is possible, but without an SSD with a lot of free space your results will be terrible. 1920x1080 at 15 frames per second will need around 45 MB of disk space per second. Most people will want to record at 20 or 25 frames per second. Most disk will not handle that and your system will start to crawl.

Your next best bet is HUFFYUV format, which is a little bit friendlier on disk bandwidth with 28 MB per second at 15 frames per second. The problem? Not many video editors and players can handle HUFFYUV, let alone video sharing services.

💣 Debugging & reporting problems

If you encounter a bug or any kind of unexpected behavior please try to reproduce it while you run Kazam from standard terminal with --debug option. Please report bugs at (https://github.com/henrywoo/kazam/issues) and include generated output.

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