Arch Linux

Santo C01

Member

Registered: 2026-03-02

Posts: 19

Spectacle screen recording crashes / produces corrupted output on KDE

Hello,

I’m experiencing an issue with Spectacle screen recording on Arch Linux. Screenshots work normally, but screen recording is consistently failing.

==> System Information
Arch Linux (fully up to date)
KDE Plasma 6 (Wayland session)
NVIDIA RTX 4090
PipeWire + WirePlumber
Spectacle version: 6.6.4-1 (installed via plasma-meta)
==> Issue Description

When attempting to record the screen using Spectacle:

.webm files are created but extremely small (~400 bytes) and not playable

ffprobe reports errors such as:

invalid as first byte of an EBML number
End of file
Switching output format to .mp4 causes Spectacle to crash (SIGSEGV)
==> Crash Details (excerpt)

From coredumpctl:

Signal: 11 (SEGV)
...
libavcodec.so.62
avcodec_send_frame
libKPipeWireRecord.so.6
libpipewire-0.3.so.0

This suggests the crash occurs during encoding via PipeWire / ffmpeg.

==> Comparison Test

OBS Studio works correctly on the same system:

Screen recording is stable
Output files are valid and playable
No crashes observed
==> What I Tested
Recording via Spectacle GUI (not using keyboard shortcuts)
Restarting PipeWire, WirePlumber, and xdg-desktop-portal services
Testing both WebM and MP4 formats
Verifying ffmpeg codec support (vp8, vp9, av1 all present)
Playback testing with mpv (works correctly for valid files)
==> Observations
Spectacle creates the container but does not properly finalize recordings
In MP4 mode, the application crashes instead
OBS appears to handle the same PipeWire environment without issues
==> Question

Is this a known issue with:

Spectacle on KDE Plasma 6 (Wayland)?
Interaction between KPipeWire and ffmpeg/libavcodec?
NVIDIA + Wayland capture pipeline?

Any suggestions for debugging or known workarounds would be appreciated.

warrenjanuel

Member

Registered: 2026-04-15

Posts: 1

Re: Spectacle screen recording crashes / produces corrupted output on KDE

I currently have the same question, perhaps someone can answer it? If someone have a solution, please tag me. Thank you very much.

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mp3 juice

honeyplease

Member

Registered: 2013-09-07

Posts: 34

Re: Spectacle screen recording crashes / produces corrupted output on KDE

I record the screen using Spectacle in webp format, results are choppy, for some reason it just cuts the recording a few seconds in randomly, the keyboard shortcut to start/stop screen recording has this super weird lag... Spectacle sucks.

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 77,491

Re: Spectacle screen recording crashes / produces corrupted output on KDE

You mean a glorified gif?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP

For the original crash the actual coredump would likely be helpful, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Core_d … _core_dump - ideally using https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Debuginfod
My money is on xdg-desktop-portal (and the encoding frame simply being invalid) - try a KDE/X11 session to see whether you get the same problems there

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