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