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pomsky
Asked: 2017-10-21 05:56:58 +0800 CST

Why are some of my screen-recording/capturing/sharing applications (or app features) not working in Ubuntu 17.10 (and later releases)?

  • 772

After upgrading to Ubuntu 17.10 I noticed some of my screencasting applications are not working, for example screencasting tools like SimpleScreenRecorder and vokoscreen. (link)

Also I noticed features like screenshot from GIMP is not working properly, producing blank screenshots (link). Shutter too is producing glitchy screenshots (link).

Screen-sharing option on Skype is also not working (link).

The issue occurs sometimes on later Ubuntu releases too.

Why is this happening and how do I fix this?

17.10

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Ubuntu 17.10 by default lets users log in to a GNOME environment on a Wayland session. You may check whether you're logged into a Wayland session instead of an Xorg (X11) session by running the following command in Terminal:

    echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE

    Applications which are not compatible with Wayland yet run under a XWayland compatibility layer. But advanced applications, which depend on and/or control X11 server "too much" (screen-capturing/recording etc.), might fail to run in a Wayland session.

    As a workaround you may switch back to an Xorg session.

    • 23

  2. Try Green Recorder. It supports Wayland & Xorg and it will work with Ubuntu 17.10. For installation instructions please check this link

    Open terminal and run all the below commands one by one

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fossproject/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo apt install green-recorder
green-recorder
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  3. I am using this workaround in Wayland. (Ubuntu 18.04)

    sleep 3s; gnome-screenshot -a -f /tmp/scr.png && \
xclip -selection clipboard -t image/png -i /tmp/scr.png
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  4. If you're trying to playback a video recorded using 'Kazam' and encoded using H.264, I'd recommend trying out different video playback applications. I noticed that some applications (specifically in my case, VLC) played back the audio fine but produced a black screen for the video. The default totem player seemed to playback the video fine, however.

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