Doom9's Forum - View Single Post - ? What are kids using to capture gameply (PC) ?

magiblot · 3rd August 2018, 16:44

Is this the place to talk bad about OBS?

For the only purpose of recording I found OBS Classic to work better than the updated branch. The problem of h264 QSV is that it's less efficient than the software encoder and it requires a lot of bitrate to provide acceptable results, in addition to being subsampled.

Among recorders that support non-subsampled formats, I would remark FRAPS, Camtasia Studio and Dxtory.

On my computer, FRAPS is able to capture games with little CPU impact, but it hasn't been updated for 5 years. It offers YUV and RGB lossless modes, but the RGB one has worse performance.

Camtasia Studio comes with a great capture codec but it's designed for recording the desktop and not games. Thus, it doesn't allow capturing fullscreen games and even with windowed ones its performance will drop compared to desktop recording. Nevertheless, I believe it's the best avaiable tool for recording the desktop. It will let you capture directly to an AVI file which can be opened by other media players (even VirtualDub or AviSynth), in spite of using its own propietary codec, which offers a much better compression than other lossless codecs.

Finally, I have found Dxtory to be a fairly updated tool and pretty much designed for recording games. Similar to FRAPS in this sense, but with plenty more options. It has performed flawlessly on my machine. I believe Lagarith works better than the codec this program comes with, but you can ask the program to use any other installed codec (in fact, it's compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit video codecs). The actual problem with this application is its expensive license.

I have tried other tools such as Captura, Bandicam, VirtualDub or FFMpeg CLI, but they didn't support recording at 60fps or had no advantage over the ones I described.

Regarding the issue of HDD efficiency, I would suggest to capture to an external USB HDD drive instead of using a SSD. From what I heard, such an exhaustive writing task can shorten the life of an SSD drive. If the external HDD drive is being only accessed to store the capture, it will offer good performance.

3rd August 2018, 16:44	#6 \| Link
magiblot Eurobeat Fan Join Date: Sep 2014 Posts: 108	Is this the place to talk bad about OBS? For the only purpose of recording I found OBS Classic to work better than the updated branch. The problem of h264 QSV is that it's less efficient than the software encoder and it requires a lot of bitrate to provide acceptable results, in addition to being subsampled. Among recorders that support non-subsampled formats, I would remark FRAPS, Camtasia Studio and Dxtory. On my computer, FRAPS is able to capture games with little CPU impact, but it hasn't been updated for 5 years. It offers YUV and RGB lossless modes, but the RGB one has worse performance. Camtasia Studio comes with a great capture codec but it's designed for recording the desktop and not games. Thus, it doesn't allow capturing fullscreen games and even with windowed ones its performance will drop compared to desktop recording. Nevertheless, I believe it's the best avaiable tool for recording the desktop. It will let you capture directly to an AVI file which can be opened by other media players (even VirtualDub or AviSynth), in spite of using its own propietary codec, which offers a much better compression than other lossless codecs. Finally, I have found Dxtory to be a fairly updated tool and pretty much designed for recording games. Similar to FRAPS in this sense, but with plenty more options. It has performed flawlessly on my machine. I believe Lagarith works better than the codec this program comes with, but you can ask the program to use any other installed codec (in fact, it's compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit video codecs). The actual problem with this application is its expensive license. I have tried other tools such as Captura, Bandicam, VirtualDub or FFMpeg CLI, but they didn't support recording at 60fps or had no advantage over the ones I described. Regarding the issue of HDD efficiency, I would suggest to capture to an external USB HDD drive instead of using a SSD. From what I heard, such an exhaustive writing task can shorten the life of an SSD drive. If the external HDD drive is being only accessed to store the capture, it will offer good performance.