Does Active Presenter work in Linux?

ActivePresenter Support Questions
1

Considering moving to Linux but need my Active Presenter.

2

Hi,

Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Porting the program to Linux will take lot of effort but now we are focusing on new features of ActivePresenter.

Regards,

3

Hey folks, found this thread when searching for “linux”. I have been using an arch-based distribution for many years now, and I have old ActivePresenter files that I need to open and export as a video. Unfortunately, ActivePresenter is not supported on linux, and I’d prefer not having to dual-boot or set up a VM with GPU passthrough just to export the video. I’m wondering if:

  1. The raw video file is somehow available or extractable from the AP files? or
  2. If there’s a way to run AP via a WINE/Proton layer, since there has been a tremendous amount of development to make windows executables run on linux.

Eager to hear back from the devs!

Thank you!

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4

Just wanted to follow-up on this. I see there’s an associated directory with the AP filename of the project, inside that directory are all the raw video and audio assets. I can combine the audio and video files with ffmpeg.

However, if there’s a way to make AP work with a compatibility layer like Wine/Proton - that would be great. If the devs can list what dependencies AP requires on the system, there may be a way to get this to work. I managed to get it installed using Wine, but it crashes after I select the Light/Dark theme.

5

I would love it if AP worked on Linux.

The only things keeping me tied to Windows are the instructional design / elearning authoring tools that I use.

Would love to let Windows go.

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6

Hi @shayaknyc,

I managed to get it installed using Wine, but it crashes after I select the Light/Dark theme.

We do not have much experience with Wine, honestly.
If you installed and opened ActivePresenter, please try accessing the Preferences dialog (Start Page > Preferences button > Miscellaneous) and:

  • Select the Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering (take effect from the next run) option
  • Select the Always use software decoders for decoding video option

In case you cannot access the Preferences dialog, you can open ActivePresenter.apconfig and add two lines below:

  "hardware.decoding":"false",
   "hardware.rendering_2":"false"

If there is other content after those 2 lines, remember to add a comma (,) at the end of line 2:

   "hardware.decoding":"false",
   "hardware.rendering_2":"false",

Note that, the ActivePresenter file config is located in the same folder with the ActivePresenter log file.
Here is the path in Windows for your reference: C:\Users\<user_name>\AppData\Roaming\ActivePresenter

BR,
Thuy

1 Like
7

Ah, thanks. I’ll give this a try! The beauty of the Proton compatibility layer, developed by Valve for Linux gaming on Windows executables, was precisely to optimize the GPU API calls between Windows-native code through the Wine/Proton layer which would pass the calls to the GPU through the Linux-native API calls. I figured, we should be able to relatively easily run AP within this context. With that said, it works by creating a virtual windows environment, with no dependencies installed (such as .NET, Visual C++ libs, standard fonts, etc) - so if there’s a dependency list of software/libraries that are usually standard installed on Windows for AP to work, it would be helpful to gain some of that insight in the hopes that we can still leverage the GPU for video exports, etc, instead of having to rely entirely on the software rendering.

1 Like