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Comment by euph0ria | Hacker News Reader

Any tips on the best software for Windows to record video? Would be nice to be able to record a part of the screen. Also, I am very wary about what I install so please no obscure software.

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OBS has a slight learning curve, but I find that it's able to do everything I need, including screen region recording, single window recording, and overlaying/switching between screen and webcam.

Thanks!

How do you record portion of the screeb? Filters > Crop?

If you're recording the full desktop, then use ShadowPlay if you have an nvidia card (it comes with the nvidia software and utilizes the native GPU encoding). Otherwise, use the Xbox Game Bar, which is installed by default in Windows 10.

If you need to record a specific portion of the screen, I'd recommend the open source tool Captura: https://mathewsachin.github.io/Captura/

It's no longer maintained as of July 2020, but it's quite effective at what it does and is not lacking for features. I use it for recording UI interactions all the time.

Xbox Game Bar is very limited. It only captures a single window not the actual desktop, so you won't see any other window, dialog or context menu.

I noticed it when I tried to record a demo of a git merge flow in an IDE. Fail!

I wish this was properly built-in on Windows, since the recording is otherwise excellent.

Thanks!

Windows actually has screen recording software built in now with the XBox Game Bar. It’s meant for recording games but there isn’t any reason that you can’t use it for other programs.

Tried it and it was 700mb for a few minutes of recording.. didn't find any way to tweak that

Hmm, I just tried it for the first time yesterday, and was actually quite impressed. I made a screen recoding of a desktop app, with me talking over it the whole time. The quality of both video and audio was good, and the file size was something like 5-10MB.

I can't believe I've been using Windows 10 for so long and didn't even know about this - I kind of wish they'd change the name TBH; would also make it seem more reasonable to be installed be default on Enterprise eds!

As another comment recommended, ShareX is a very good and popular (if not the most popular) tool for small recordings. Also it's open source, small in size, and it has portable versions available in its repo[0] (so technically you don't have to install anything).

[0]: https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX/releases

Thanks! Didn't know this existed.

ShareX is pretty good for recording short clips/gifs of part of the screen

Screen2gif seems to be an option also

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