wf-recorder
Screen recording for Wayland compositors
TLDR
SYNOPSIS
wf-recorder [OPTIONS]
DESCRIPTION
wf-recorder is a screen recording tool for Wayland compositors that use the wlroots library (e.g., Sway, Hyprland). It captures the screen to video files with optional audio, supporting various output formats and codecs via FFmpeg. The default output file is recording.mp4 in the current directory.Stop recording with Ctrl+C or by sending SIGINT. Region selection can be done interactively with slurp. Hardware-accelerated encoding is supported through VAAPI codecs.By default, wf-recorder only requests new frames when the screen updates, producing a variable framerate output. Use -D to record continuously at a constant framerate instead.
PARAMETERS
-f, --file PATH
Output file path-a, --audio
Include audio in recording-g, --geometry WxH+X+Y
Record specified region-c CODEC
Video codec to use (e.g., h264_vaapi, libx264)-C CODEC
Audio codec to use-o, --output NAME
Record specific Wayland output (monitor)-r, --framerate FPS
Set recording framerate-d, --device PATH
DRM device for hardware encoding-p KEY=VALUE
Pass codec-specific parameters (e.g., -p crf=20)-F FILTER
FFmpeg filter string (e.g., scale=1280:720)-b N
Maximum number of B-Frames to use-B, --buffrate FPS
Predicted framerate for the encoder (preserves VFR, fixes FPS limits with some encoders like svt-av1)-D, --no-damage
Disable damage optimization; record every frame even without screen updates (produces constant framerate)-y
Force overwrite the output file without prompting-h
Print help information-v
Print version information
CAVEATS
Wayland only; requires a wlroots-based compositor with wlr-screencopy support. Audio recording requires PipeWire or PulseAudio. Some compositors may require specific configuration for screen capture. The output format is determined by the file extension given to -f; unrecognized extensions will cause the command to fail.
