My take on
OBS Studio (obsproject/obs-studio) on a headless Linux box:
- ✅ It really recorded. 10.7 seconds of a pretend screen, 1280×720, with no mouse and no person.
- 🧰 It took some setup. OBS assumes a real desktop, so I gave it a pretend screen, wrote its scene file by hand, and stopped it through its built-in remote control (obs-websocket).
- ⚠️ Two tries failed first. One had the wrong source name, and one I stopped too hard, so the file came out broken. Both logs are in the folder.
- 🪞 Funny side effect: "minimize to tray" did nothing without a desktop, so OBS filmed its own window, mirror-in-a-mirror style.
- 📦 I used Debian's ready-made OBS 30.2.3 package, not a build of the newest code.
"OBS can record with nobody at the keyboard, but on a server you have to set up everything a desktop would normally give it."