Automatic File Saving Directory Setting does not persist and defaults to home folder

For now, this is intended behavior. There are two kinds of people in this world, the ones that like their directory settings retained over different sessions and the ones that don't. ;)

Myself, I am sometimes in one group, sometimes in the other.

Kazam defaults to ~/Videos and ~/Pictures folders for automatic saving. If those folders are not available then ~/Documents is used and the last fallback is ~/. Pathnames are taken from XDG, so if you are using localized version of Ubuntu, Kazam will use localized named for those directories.

I'll set this to "Won't Fix" for now. If demanded by a popular vote, this can be changed of course. :)

Apologies for the late response.

I find the current behaviour to be very confusing, as there is no indication that it would be a session preference. The setting is in the general preference dialog and the current behaviour "feels" broken.

Furthermore, the kazam configuration file also has a configuratin key "autosave_video_dir" which kazam is ignoring.

(As a side note, I like to organize my files differently and do not even have a Video folder on my system)

Would you accept a patch?

I should apologize. :) This indeed is a bug, someone pointed it out two days ago and it is already being worked on.

The intended behavior that I described is of course only valid if you don't have automatic file saving turned on. When you turn on the automatic file saving, then the directory you select should be saved in a config file.

This was supposedly fixed a year ago, however I am running Kazam on Lubuntu 14.04, and I'm experiencing this issue.
I can try and set the automatic recording to another directory, but after closing the preferences pane and reopening, it's reset itself to the default "Videos" directory.

I can't get it to record to any other directory, and the screencast I'm trying to record is bigger than my local disk... so essentially I cannot screencast it because I can't give Kazam a directory with enough space to record. My disk just fills to 100% and the video doesn't get compressed.

I have this bug with Kazam 1.4.5-1 on Xubuntu 14.10 Beta 2. "Automatic file saving" is on, but the directory always reverts to "$HOME".

Workaround: close Kazam, open the file "$HOME/.config/kazam/kazam.conf", change the value of the property "autosave_video_dir" in the section "[main]". Open Kazam, but don't open the preferences dialog. The custom directory will be used. However, as soon as the preferences dialog is open, the custom directory will be overwrited.

Since a fix was released, I think that the ubuntu's repository should be updated with the fixed version, shouldn't it?

This bug is still existing in Kazam 1.4.5-2 on Ubuntu Mate 16.10. Workaround from 2014 still works.

2017-01-27 and this bug STILL exists, two years later.

Sorry, this is in 1.4.5 under Kubuntu

I am experiencing this same bug on Ubuntu 18.04.1 and Kazam 1.4.5.

Preferences --> Automatic File Saving (ON) --> Newly-specified save directory reverts to ~/Videos upon restarting application

For those still experience the problem, and find this bug(I'm in Ubuntu 18.04):

1. You cannot use bookmarked folder in folder choose dialog, some explanation can be found here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/159413

2. use below patch, to let video path can be correctly read when preference dialog:
--- /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/kazam/frontend/preferences.py 2014-08-19 00:48:36.000000000 +0800
+++ preferences.py 2019-06-03 16:20:08.231795751 +0800
@@ -73,7 +73,7 @@
         self.combobox_audio2.pack_start(audio_renderer, True)
         self.combobox_audio2.add_attribute(audio_renderer, "text", 0)

- self.filechooser_video.set_current_folder(prefs.video_dest)
+ #self.filechooser_video.set_current_folder(prefs.video_dest)

         self.populate_codecs()
         if prefs.sound:

3. use below patch, to let screenshot file name can be correctly saved:
--- /usr/share/kazam/ui/preferences.ui 2014-08-19 00:48:36.000000000 +0800
+++ preferences.ui 2019-06-03 16:23:08.328935786 +0800
@@ -698,6 +698,7 @@
                     <property name="invisible_char">•</property>
                     <property name="invisible_char_set">True</property>
                     <property name="caps_lock_warning">False</property>
+ <signal name="changed" handler="cb_entry_autosave_picture" swapped="no"/>
                     <signal name="activate" handler="cb_entry_autosave_picture" swapped="no"/>
                   </object>
                   <packing>

patch for reference.

It didn't work. Problem persists