• 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

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

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)

• 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