GNOME screencast feature stops after 30s

When looking for screencast solutions I stumbled over a Gnome3 functionality that I didn’t know before: when pressing Alt+Ctrl+Shift+R Gnome3 starts recording the screen and saves the video in $XDG_VIDEOS_DIR. I tried that multiple times and the recording starts after a few seconds (indicated by a red dot in the notification area). But it stops after 20-30 seconds. According to the gnome documentation the recording should stop when pressing the Alt+Ctrl+Shift+R keycombo again.

Control+Shift+Alt+R keybinding starts and stops the recording. (Note: this functionality is currently missing in some distribution packages.) A red circle is displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen when the recording is in progress. After the recording is finished, a file named ‘shell~~%d%u~~%c.webm’ is saved in your Videos directory. In the filename, %d is the date, %u is a string that makes the filename unique, and %c is a counter that is incremented each time a recording is made within a single gnome-shell session.
and
Ctrl+Shift+Alt+R: Start and end screencast recording
(from https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell/CheatSheet)

on the other hand there is https://askubuntu.com/questions/919807/how-to-change-screencast-duration-in-gnome3-screen-recorder which says:

Find org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys in the tree of settings
Find the setting named max-screencast-length (the default value is 30 seconds)

I didn’t have the dconf key, added it, but it didn’t change the behaviour. As the length my recordings is not an exact number, but varies between 20 and 30 seconds, I don’t think its a max-length setting that stops the screen recorder.

I think this functionality could be helpful for debugging (and documentation), on the other hand it could have privacy implications to have such a functionality. either way, if it is enabled, I think it should work as advertised in the gnome documentation.

So, should screen recording be built in? Sorry if this has already been discussed elsewhere…
PS: (and maybe its not even possible to disable it)
PPS: (i don’t know how to debug gnome-shell to find out why it stops, pointers welcome)

Feature Branch: feature/12723-unlimited-screencasts

Related issues

• Related to #10656 (closed)
• Related to #8666

Original created by @muri on 12723 (Redmine)