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I've been using kdenlive to make videos on ubuntu for a while and the screen grab has been fine but, for some reason (probably something I did to try to get the desktop start button to work on ubuntu 20.04) my display has changed from :0 to :1

I have been able to muddle on by starting screen capture in a terminal with

ffmpeg -video_size 1306x745 -framerate 25 -f x11grab -i :1.0+60,23 ./scrgrab01.mp4

Then importing each of the clips into kdenlive. But it's a bit messy having to edit a terminal command and remember which clip is which. Also I have now set up a desktop computer with more muscle and want to use that for rendering but that too has the display :1 not :0

I tried going into configure->capture->manage encoding profiles and trying to add ffmpeg arguments like

-crf 25 -i :1.0+60,23 -vcodec libx264 -preset veryfast -threads 0

(and lots of different permutations of that) But nothing has worked so far.

Is there something really obvious that I have overlooked?

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From what I can see, kdenlive is hard-coded to use DISPLAY :0, while ubuntu and gnome/gdm have switched (around ubuntu 18??) to put the user on DISPLAY :1. When I tried the lightdm manager, I found that it still has the older convention of putting the user on the :0 DISPLAY, which is compatible with kdenlive screen grab. So if you don't mind switching window manager, that could be a way to do it.

I also tried to understand if it is possible to have gdm3 put the user on DISPLAY :0 as a default at boot time through some custom configuration, but couldn't figure it out.

In the user's gdm3 session that is on :1 by default, I also tried to set DISPLAY :0 in an xterm and start kdenlive from the command line in that xterm. However, for some reason I got a Qt error doing that, and so I couldn't tell if that was a useful workaround or not.

Note that kdenlive screen grab has some wonky behaviour, which made it harder for me to understand this problem. The 21.12.3 version I was using didn't show me the error output from the ffmpeg command, and it was only by chance I tried the 22.04 version this evening (which was scheduled for release tomorrow but I guess it went out early) and it did now show that error output.

Note also KDE documentation talks about a need to obtain an ffmpeg binary compiled with --enable-x11grab (or more properly, --enable-libxcb) in order for kdenlive screen grab to work. In fact, I don't seem to need this ffmpeg option to get a screen grab. It was just the DISPLAY business that had to be fixed.

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  • Thanks for suggestions @JB it might be worth doing a few tests, but for anything too complicated it will be easier to just middle on with ffmpg
    – paddyg
    May 13, 2022 at 6:46

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