GNOME Shell Adds VP9 Screencasting, Mutter Improves Wayland

For the upcoming GNOME 3.15.4 development milestone release towards GNOME 3.16 there are some notable improvements for the GNOME Shell and Mutter.

Mutter 3.15.4 was checked in this morning by Florian Müllner and it has Wayland improvements and other exciting changes with GTK+ now drawing all window decorations, a change to replicate the monitor EDID parsing for Mutter on Wayland so it acts the same way as under X11, Mutter now handles input device configuration, and there's support for pointer barriers with Mutter on Wayland. The pointer barriers on Wayland will ensure that the pointer never enters "dead areas" of the screen due to different monitor sizes, etc.

The Mutter 3.15.4 release also has many bug-fixes as outlined by the mailing list announcement.

The GNOME Shell 3.15.4 release meanwhile has many minor tweaks and improvements, including making the slider scrolling smoother. For those doing any screencast recording with the GNOME Shell, the default file format has changed to VP9. Previously the GNOME Shell screencast recorder used VP8, but with VP9 now being the stable successor and yielding better compression at the same video quality and is now widely supported, the GNOME Shell has switched over to VP9.

More GNOME Shell 3.15.4 details via its announcement.