I have an Acer Swift SF113-31. A sort of mid range laptop. It’s amazing what it can do as its its not hugely powerful. The one thing it has fared badly at is recording video of my KDE desktop. I wanted to record something in the browser to video. FFmpeg recommends a few methods. But even with the least CPU intensive method the video of the desktop and browser is a choppy mess. Frames dropped all over the place. To be fair this was when I was recording some 3D WebGL (Babylon.js) that was running in the Microsoft Edge browser. That was already taking up the CPU so there was barely anything left for FFmpeg to process video capture. But then … it happened …
I’d forgotten that my laptop has a Quick Sync chip. Why was nothing using it ?! As it turns out you have to do quite a complicated build of FFmpeg to actually get it to use Quick Sync. This is due to Intel’s licensing and other complexities. But thankfully I found this gist which does work actually. Now with “/usr/local/ffmpeg/bin/ffmpeg -video_size 1920×1080 -framerate 30 -f x11grab -i :0.0+0,0 -vcodec h264_qsv output1.mkv” I finally get an acceptable video …