Bug 503406

Summary:	Spectacle freezes when capturing video
Product:	[Applications] Spectacle	Reporter:	Sylens <oat-lip-confront>
Component:	General	Assignee:	Noah Davis <noahadvs>
Status:	RESOLVED DUPLICATE
Severity:	normal	CC:	john.kizer, kde, nicolas.fella, oat-lip-confront
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	6.3.4
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Other
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Sylens 2025-04-26 22:05:33 UTC

Whenever I try to capture a video, the recording starts, and when i want to stop the recording, spectacle greys out and not responding, its like it freezes out. Then if I wait for almost one minute, the video recording will appear in my video folders. The video record is a 5-10second test video, 14kB at size, so not something with a big resolution.. I remember spectacle worked fine with video recording, and started behaving oddly recently with, like.. 6.13 frameworks perhaps?

Operating System: EndeavourOS 
KDE Plasma Version: 6.3.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.13.0
Qt Version: 6.9.0
Kernel Version: 6.14.3-arch1-1 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 4 × Intel® Core™ i5-3470 CPU @ 3.20GHz
Memory: 15.6 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: Quadro K620
Manufacturer: FUJITSU
Product Name: ESPRIMO E510

Comment 1 John Kizer 2025-04-28 05:53:05 UTC

Hi - could you please specify:

* What type of recording you're performing - Rectangular Region, Full Screen, or Window?
* In Configure > Video Saving, what format is chosen? This is the drop-down with options for MP4/H.264, WebM/VP9, Animated WebP, and GIF

Thanks!

Comment 2 Sylens 2025-04-28 10:16:38 UTC

Hi

Of course. So the video format is the default WebM/VP9.

Seems that the freeze only occurs when I dona fulsscreen recording. My screen is 1680x1050 res. The rectangular selection and window records seems working fine, altho they also lag a bit when I stop the recording, but definitely not freezing the program itself.

However, when I switched to MP4/H.264, all the freezing was gone, including fullscreen records.

So perhaps it's something with the WebM. I noticed high CPU (70%) usage while using WebM,- and normal CPU usage (20%) during the MP4 session.

Comment 3 John Kizer 2025-04-28 17:06:51 UTC

Thanks - and it does in fact seem like there is an issue with WebM/VP9 specifically. What you're seeing seems to stem from the underlying issue https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=488896 (also reported in a way that more closely resembles your observations at https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=498691 ), so I'm merging this in with that issue for visibility.

The good news is that as tagged on that other bug report, there's a major improvement in VP9 encoding speeds set to be released in the KPipewire component of Plasma 6.4.0 that should essentially resolve this.

Thanks!

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 488896 ***

Comment 4 Sylens 2025-04-28 17:33:05 UTC

You're very welcome. Glad I could help. Thanks for looking into it :)