peek

• build: Fixed building with CMake

Changes:

• feat: Dialog to set recording area size (#246, #519)
• feat: Use radio buttons for format selection to easily show selected format
• fix: Show error dialog on startup if recording backend is unavailable (#539)
• fix: Fix missing title in taskbar on KDE Plasma (#349)
• fix: Changing output format in small UI mode resizes the window
• fix: Disable menu during recording
• i18n: New translations for Finnish and Hebrew
• i18n: Updated translations for Basque, Chinese (Simplified),
  Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Indonesian,
  Lithuanian, Norwegian Bokmål, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish and Swedish

Fixes some color issues with the new VP9 encoding and rebuilds Ffmpeg for Flatpak and AppImage to fully support the VP9 encoding.

• fix: Use yuv420p for VP9 encoding (#299)
• fix: Disable animations and transitions on recording view overlays (#208)
• i18n: Updated French and Russian translations
• packaging: Build ffmpeg with vp9_superframe for Flatpak and AppImage (#300, #301)

This release brings again bugfixes, recording improvements and localization updates. The biggest announcement is maybe that I stop supporting Snap, please see my announcement for details.

I have intentionally left out any UI changes this time and wanted to release the many smaller fixes to existing functionality first. The next release will be more focused on UI again.

• feat: Use VP9 instead of VP8 for WebM recording (#293)
• feat: libx264 is no longer required when just recording GIF / APNG with FFmpeg back end
• feat: Removed avconv / libav backend and ImageMagick post processor
• misc: Added sources for DBus interfaces (#296)
• fix: Fixed lossy artifacts increasing GIF size when using gnome-shell recorder (#288)
• fix: Fixed countdown sometimes appearing in recording (#208)
• fix: Do not freeze window size on Xfce (#269)
• i18n: Fixed names of Chinese localization files (#294)
• i18n: Updated translations for Basque, Chinese (Simplified), Lithuanian,
  Norwegian Bokmål, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian
• packaging: Removed Snapcraft build and Snap packages (#245, #270)

This is the long overdue 1.4 release, which most importantly fixes some crashes occurring on many systems and updates the UI for new GNOME guidelines.

Thanks a lot for everybody who contributed, especially for your patience with this project. Your support has been amazing, most of the things changed here were provided by new contributors. I should have done this release way earlier, and originally it should have been out before GNOME 3.32. But as it sometimes goes real live and other projects kept me busy. Sorry for the long delay.

I originally wanted to include more in this release, but in the end it is more important to bring this release out and then focus on the future. I don't want to have such a long delay again.

Changes:

• feat: Move app menu into application Window (#391, #438)
• feat: New application icon following new GNOME icon guidelines (#114, #390)
• feat: Set window type hint to UTILITY (ensures window gets opened as floating
  on tiling window managers)
• feat: Show shortcut hint in main window (#234, #285)
• feat: Added Recorder, Video and AudioVideo to desktop files categories (#340)
• feat: Improved the error message shown on GNOME Shell recording issues
• feat: Provide more details in error reports
• fix: Fixed double free error after ffmpeg recording (#419)
• fix: Fixed building with Vala 0.46.1 (#501)
• misc: Raised minimum Gtk version to 3.20
• i18n: Updated translations for Basque, Chinese (simplified),
  Chinese (traditional), Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Italian,
  Japanese, Lithuanian, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil),
  Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian
• i18n: New translations for Japanese and Turkish
• build: New Meson based build (old CMake build is deprecated and will be
  removed in release 1.5)
• build: Autogenerate po/LINGUAS

• feat: Option to enable/disable desktop notifications after saving (#21)
• fix: Do not use H.264 baseline profile if libx264 was compiled with 10bit (#248)
• fix: Recording 1fps with Ffmpeg does not fail anymore (#249)
• i18n: Updated translations for Arabic, Basque, Chinese (Simplified), Czech,
  Dutch, Esperanto, German, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil),
  Russian, Swedish

This release provides updated translations. Thanks for all the translators who provided up-to-date translations of the many changes 1.2.0 brought.

Peek's translations are overall in a pretty good shape, but there are still incomplete translation. So if Peek is not yet available in your native language, the translation is incomplete or you spot any errors, head over to Weblate and help translating :)

Changes:

• i18n: Updated translations for Arabic, Czech, Esperanto, French, Lithuanian, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish and Serbian

This release of Peek brings many changes, among them an improved user interface, improved stability and hugely reduced resource usage. The highlights:

• A new user interface with quick format selection, display of elapsed time during recording and better error reporting
• The RAM and disk space usage during GIF generation was reduced significantly due to Peek no longer relying on ImageMagick for GIF generation but using Ffmpeg directly
• Optional support for the awesome gifski GIF generator, which allows high quality GIF animations
• Support recording APNG files

Special thanks go to Alessandro (@gort818) who implemented the new UI with format selection and time display. That's very much appreciated, good work there. And thanks to all the translators and everybody who contributed by reporting issues and giving feedback.

Installation

See the installation instructions for details on how to get and install Peek. I maintain the Ubuntu PPA, Flatpak repository, Snap packages and Arch AUR packages myself, so they are already up-to-date. Other package repositories might take a while until they get updated, but you can always install from source, too.

Using gifski

Peek now supports gifski, a new GIF encoder written by Kornel Lesiński, who known for his work on ImageOptim. gifski provides awesome quality for GIF animations. By cleverly combining separate frames it can create GIFs that display thousands of colors in a single frame. If the gifski executable is found in the path Peek will show a setting to enable gifski for GIF encoding. You can also select the quality level. Encoding with gfiski will be slower than the default and especially on the higher quality settings files will be significantly larger, but depending on what you record the quality can be amazing. Just give it a try!

As gifski is a pretty new software only your distribution likely does not offer a package for it. But you can download pre-compiled binaries from gifski's release page or install from source. Once you have placed the gifski executable in your path open Peek's preferences and enable "Use gifski for high quality GIFs".

Deprecation of avconv backend

The avconv backend Peek currently still supports is deprecated and I will likely be removing it in one of the next releases. Since major distributions have switched back to Ffmpeg and avconv is lacking behind in regards to format support needed for Peek it has become unpractical to support it. You can't use it for APNG and GIF generation, so if you use it Peek will fall back to using ImageMagick (with all the issues this had) for GIF and won't support APNG at all. The avconv backend is also mostly untested. Please get in touch if you actually still have to rely on avconv to use Peek.

Next steps

I will likely release a new minor version soon with updated translations and bug fixes if something pops up. Help in translating and reporting issues is very much appreciated for this. Apart from this I have marked a few features that I would like to get tackled for the next release. No promise everything will make it, but those are the things I am currently interested in getting done next. If you want to help on this or you have a specific thing you want to get done, feel free to get in touch and submit pull requests.

Full changelog

• feat: Quick format selection in headerbar (#174)
• feat: GIF conversion with gifski if installed for improved quality (#212, #179)
• feat: GIF quality level can be set in preferences, if gifski is available (#212)
• feat: GIF conversion with FFmpeg as default instead of ImageMagick (#125)
• feat: Display elapsed time in headerbar (#214)
• feat: Display an animated spinner while post processing (#58)
• feat: Support APNG as output format (#108)
• feat: Command line parameter --no-headerbar (#203)
• feat: Show dialog with error details on recording errors (#49)
• fix: Temporary files get unique name again (was broken in #161)
• fix: Quitting application does not interrupt rendering (#189)
• fix: Much smaller temporary file sizes
• fix: Recording could be stopped before it had actually started
• fix: Do not load local settings schema in release builds
• fix: On Plasma with Breeze theme Peek window was hard to resize (#199)
• i18n: Added Chinese (Traditional), Neapolitan
• i18n: Updated translations for Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, German, Italian,
  Lithuanian, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Serbian, Swedish
• build: libkeybinder is now optional
• package: Reduced file size for Snap packages

This release mainly enables recording without a compositor and attempts to handle ImageMagick's RAM usage more intelligently depending on the available RAM. Thanks again to everybody who helped translate Peek, reported issues and provided code or feedback.

Changes:

• feat: Transparent recording area without compositor (#147, #7)
• fix: Unusual default permissions (#161)
• fix: Explicitly set ImageMagick resource limits (#112, #125)
• i18n: Updated translations for Basque, Chinese (Simplified), Czech, Dutch,
  French, German, Lithuanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Polish,
  Portuguese (Brazil)
• build: New flag DISABLE_GNOME_SHELL to disable gnome-shell recorder
• build: New flag DISABLE_OPEN_FILE_MANAGER to disable file manager integration
• build: Use CMake GNUInstallDirs variables
• package: Updated dependencies for Flatpak and Snap packages
• package: Stable Snap package depending on gnome-platform 3.26 (#84)

Update: AppImage packages are now also available for download from below. Those are still a bit experimental, let me know whether they work for you or not.

Hotfix release fixing packaging bugs:

• package: Fixed installing man page
• package: Fixed Debian packaging

Another update with mainly bug fixes, translation updates but also some smaller tweaks. Unfortunately I did not tackle the big issue of ImageMagick having too strict resource limits on some systems (Ubuntu and Debian mainly), but I did not want to delay this release further.

The changes in this release:

• feat: Finish saving file when closing window while rendering (#142)
• feat: Highlight file when launching Dolphin file manager
• recording: Use raw video for recording GIF with GNOME Shell recorder (this
  is identical to how FFmpeg recorder works) (#116)
• fix: Failed to record MP4 when dimensions where not divisible by 2 (#141)
• fix: Make sure recording starts after countdown is hidden (#146)
• fix: Closing window while recording could leave temp files behind
• fix: KDE Plasma and XFCE were showing an empty button in notification
• fix: Place close button on the left on all desktops configured this way (#129)
• fix: Cinammon showing notification with icon
• i18n: Indonesian and Serbian translation
• i18n: Updated translations for Basque, Esperanto, French, Portuguese (Brazil),
  Russian and Ukrainian
• docs: Added man page (#136)
• package: Removed dark theme hack for Flatpak (proper theme support is part of
  Flatpak now)
• package: Updated dependencies for Flatpak and Snap packages

A small update to Peek with a couple of fixes and minor improvements and updated documentation. There is now experimental Snappy support, too. Changes:

• recording: Use H.264 baseline profile for MP4 for increased browser
  compatibility (#111)
• recording: For WebM GNOME Shell recorder use same quality settings as with
  FFmpeg encoder
• ui: Show only the most recent "file saved" notification to avoid spamming
  the desktop with notifications.
• fix: Set temporary directory for ImageMagick
• fix: Always launch with GDK_BACKEND=x11 for Wayland
• fix: Detect if global menus are disabled in Unity when running as
  Flatpak / Snap package
• i18n: Updated translations for Arabic, Czech, Russian and Spanish
• i18n: New translations for Basque and Esperanto
• docs: Added Debian instructions to build custom package
• docs: Added Snappy install instructions (development builds only)

This is the 1.0 release of Peek, the simple screen recorder for animated GIFs and now also WebM and MP4.

The highlights of this release are:

• Wayland! Peek now works in a GNOME Shell Wayland session
• WebM and MP4 are supported as output formats in addition to animated GIFs
• Keyboard shortcut to start / stop recording
• Use built-in GNOME Shell recording functionality instead of FFmpeg when running in GNOME Shell
• Various resource usage optimizations, which should avoid most of the issues people ran into while recording
• Peek can now easily be installed with Flatpak on all distributions supporting it.

Thanks again to all contributors who provided pull requests, reported bugs and feature requests and translated Peek in 19 languages.

Installation

See the installation instructions for details on how to get and install Peek. I maintain the Ubuntu PPA, Arch AUR packages and Flatpak repository myself, so they are already up-to-date. Other package repositories might take a while until they get updated, but you can always install from source, too.

What comes next?

Peek has now all the features I originally imagined for a complete release, hence the 1.0 version number. But this does not mean it is finished, there are many great ideas how to improve Peek. As I stated earlier and want to keep Peek focused on its main task of creating short screencasts of screen areas.

My immediate plan going forward is as follows:

1. Make a small follow up release with updated translations and, if necessary, bug fixes soon. I need your help here, so if you use Peek please report all issues you find. And if you speak a language other than English, consider to help translate Peek.
2. Improve the UI of Peek to give better feedback on progress and errors and allow easy access to recorded files (see https://github.com/phw/peek/issues/21, https://github.com/phw/peek/issues/49, and https://github.com/phw/peek/issues/58)

After that I would like to evaluate more advanced feature requests and see if and how they could be implemented. But development will likely slow down a bit at that point, as I have to focus more on other projects.

Full changelog

• recording: Support GNOME Shell screencast DBus service. Allows recording
  under GNOME Shell with XWayland (#33)
• recording: Support WebM and MP4 as output format (#73)
• recording: Added option to not record mouse cursor
• recording: Default frame rate is now 10fps
• ui: Recording can be started / stopped via configurable keyboard shortcut (#23)
• ui: Add --start, --stop and --toggle command line parameters to control
  the recording
• ui: Add --backend command line parameter to manually choose recording
  backend (gnome-shell, ffmpeg or avcodec for now)
• ui: Hide button label on small window width. Allows for smaller recording area.
• misc: Use org.freedesktop.FileManager1 DBus service for launching file manager.
• fix: Fixed a possible race condition that could lead to empty or broken files (#1)
• fix: Moving Peek partially outside the visible area does no longer break the
  recording. Instead the recording area is clipped to the visible part (#64)
• fix: Starting recording in maximized window relocated the window on Ubuntu Unity (#74)
• fix: When canceling the file chooser also stop the background processing
  of the image (#96)
• i18n: Many updated translations, with Czech, Dutch, German, Lithuanian,
  Polish and Swedish 100% completed
• package: Peek is available from a Flatpak repository (#85)
• package: Provide AppStream data
• docs: Much improved README

Just a small hotfix since I forgot to add all the new translations to the installation.

Changes

• i18n: Fixed Czech, Croatian, Korean, Dutch and Chinese (Simplified) not getting installed

The Peek GIF screen recorder has a new release 0.9. The highlights of this release are the reduced temporary file size, improvements for Ubuntu users and many new translations. Peek can now be easily installed on Ubuntu using the Peek PPA on Launchpad. See the README for details on this. Also there have been some important fixes to integrate Peek better into the Unity desktop.

Thanks to everybody who contributed to Peek by providing patches, translating and reporting bugs and feature request.

Changes

• ui: Fix problem of app menu not available on certain desktop configurations (#6)
• ui: Fix display of desktop notifications on Ubuntu Unity (#55)
• ui: Close button is displayed left on Ubuntu Unity (#67)
• ui: Workaround for gray borders under unity (#11)
• ui: Smaller border around recording area
• recording: Add resolution downsampling option (#32)
• recording: Minimal frame rate is now 1fps
• recording: Smaller temporary files by using libx264rgb instead of huffyuv (#2)
• recording: Support for avconf, if ffmpeg is unavailable (#56)
• i18n: Chinese (Simplified) translation
• i18n: Croatian translation
• i18n: Czech translation
• i18n: Dutch translation
• i18n: Italian translation
• i18n: Korean translation
• i18n: Norwegian Bokmål translation
• i18n: Portuguese (Brazil) translation
• i18n: Swedish translation
• fix: Fix possible crash when loading schema from local folder
• fix: Fix temp file deletion warning
• package: Peek is installable via Ubuntu PPA (#15)
• docs: Update installation instructions
• docs: Added FAQs

The new release of Peek, the simple screen recorder for animated GIFs, improves the user experience when finishing the recording and brings some important fixes if Peek was installed into locations other than /usr. Also Peek is now translated into 11 languages.

Changes

• ui: Change button text while rendering (#24)
• ui: Add a --version command line argument
• ui: Show file choose directly after recording stops. This way
  rendering and choosing the file take place in parallel (#30)
• recording: Correctly scale recording area on HiDPI screens (#20)
• i18n: Arabic translation
• i18n: Catalan translation
• i18n: French translation
• i18n: Lithuanian translation
• i18n: Polish translation
• i18n: Portuguese (Portugal) translation
• i18n: Russian translation
• i18n: Spanish translation
• i18n: Ukrainian translation
• misc: Added generic name and sub category to desktop file
• misc: Added uninstall target, so source installations can be uninstalled
  with make uninstall (#28)
• fix: Fix DBUS service file if installed to location other than /usr (#13)
• fix: Locales not loaded if not installed to /usr due to missing locale path

Contributors

This is the first release of Peek including contributions by multiple developers and translators. People who contributed to this release in no particular order:

• Matthias Mailänder
• Mohamed Sakhri
• Victor Kropp
• Stefan Adams
• Dawid Dziurla
• Adolfo Jayme-Barrientos
• Alexander Wunschik
• Holman Calderón
• Yoan Malié
• Moo
• Steeven Lopes
• Boris Sikora

Thanks a lot to everybody who contributed and also to all the people reporting issues and feature requests.

• ui: Fixed window size not saved properly in Gtk 3.20 (#5)

• build: Fixed building with Gtk 3.14
• build: Allow building with Gettext < 0.19 (disables localized .desktop file)

• ui: Moved record / stop button to header
• ui: Show desktop notification after saving, with ability
  to open the file manager from there
• ui: Use custom styling for recording area overlay
• i18n: .desktop file gets translated

• ui: Removed unused auto save option from preferences dialog
• fix: Try to always open the file manager, not the image viewer
• general: Changed app id to com.uploadedlobster.peek due to the
  previous using the wrong domain name by default. This also resets
  existing settings.
• i18n: Updated German translation