Whats the Best free 1080p screen recording software?

This is probably already a thread, but its probably outdated so im creating a new one. I want to record at 1080p some bf3 gameplay. preferably uncompressed and with surround sound, but it has to be free, or close to it if its really good. another thing to consider is how much lag it will cause on the machine in my signature while playing Battlefield 3. Any suggestions would be really great.

 

just a heads up, there is no software solution (paid or otherwise) that avoids a pretty significant performance implication.

you can use hardware to avoid performance penalty. basically you want a recorder with an hdmi input and output that the signal can pass through, and record onto an external device with it's own hard disk. This would probably use x264 compression (uncompressed 1080p is GIANT- about 175 MB / second @ 30fps).

You pretty much have to accept compression, but that isn't really a bad thing. You don't have to give up much in terms of quality to get reasonable size files with x264.

You also then have to accept a trade off between performance and cost. You can use additional hardware or a software solution. At the very least, you'll likely need at least a second hard drive. You don't want to run the game and the OS from the same drive that you are recording to.

 

Well Fraps could record up to 2560x1600 so 1080p on a 1920x1200 would be ok, There's a demo version which is of course free but has a watermark on the video also I believe it has limitations that you could only record to a certain extent (10 mins maybe?).

as for the Lag, the 485m on ultra high settings would be pushing it already, much more recording on it. I can't say it will be a smooth experience to say the least.

 

fraps will only record for 30 seconds, not 10 minutes, so thats sort of out of the picture

 

i don't know if it does 1080p, but you might look into msi afterburner or evga precision software.

from the precision website:

Added high performance realtime in-game video capture support by means of built-in video capture engine of new MSI On-Screen Display server. You no longer need to waste your money on purchasing an additional video capture application, now MSI Afterburner is providing such functionality to everyone and absolutely for free! The key features of video capture engine are:
Realtime video capture support for any Direct3D8, Direct3D9, Direct3D10, Direct3D11 and OpenGL applications.
Queued frame capture algorithms are aimed to minimize the graphics pipeline stalling caused by transferring pixel data from GPU to CPU and keep high and smooth in-game framerate while video capture is in progress.
Multiple video capture formats: uncompressed video capture for the systems with high performance disk I/O subsystems, two different compression modes for the systems with both mid-range and high performance multicore CPUs.
Multithreaded SIMD optimized encoders are aimed to provide the maximum compression performance on modern multicore CPUs with SSE2 instructions support.
Various options allowing you to tweak video capture performance on your system: customizable target video framerate, customizable target video quality, controllable multithreaded optimization and various frame downsampling modes.
Audio stream capture and additional video capture related enhancements are coming in future versions.
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I haven't tried it yet, but I'm going to.

 

To do what you're asking, you need a desktop system running alongside your existing system with a Black Magic HDMI capture card, and HDD in a RAID config to get the sustained speed up to spec.

I've tried to do this all sorts of different ways, and believe me, that's the only one that has sustained 30fps smoothly for any length of time. The above config stayed smooth for over 2 hours and captures were perfect, and didn't affect performance of the application since it was a seperate machine doing the capturing.

Unfortunately, that option is a far cry from being free.


The MSI route with Afterburner (via Raptor) requires an MSI graphics card, and in my experience has made whatever you're trying to capture a little unstable. The captures were certainly not smooth on anything that was already pushing the CPU or GPU a bit.

 

msi afterburner works on any nvidia graphics card.
edit: yes your right you need and msi card

 

You do? I used it on my Alienware......Guess I should stop.

 

If it's working then carry on. It shouldn't be working though - either you have an MSI card in that laptop, or you have a card that the software thinks is MSI. Nothing to lose by trying it, but it certainly refuses to run on either of the two systems I have that have NVidia cards.

 

Too late, already bought FRAPS, lol

 

where is the download link for that i would like to try.

 

MSI Afterburner Download the beta so you can record the audio along with the game.

 

thanks that thing works great! on my clevo!

edit: you can do uncompressed video capture, and i cant even play it back its so uncompressed.

 

No problem [: And i don't understand your edit: "you can do uncompressed video capture, and i cant even play it back its so uncompressed" ??

 

This is usually where you start analysing the file, and realising that you can't play it back, because it hasn't actually recorded properly in the first place...

...record compressed.

 

this is the point where i put it on my ramdisk and was then able to play it back. and it was like i was playing the game for realz.

and yes it did record, it was only 5 seconds long and it took 2.98gb

 

Thanks for the clear up, Didn't know 'till now.

Yeah, the files can get pretty big. Try to lower the quality in the settings.

 

Not long enough to have hit problems then. That's almost 600Mb a second, and no hard disk can keep up with that.

With no audio you need just over 237Mb per second. With that much overhead to process, something's got to give. This is why I only ever use a second PC for capturing that, and I use RAID! That also says to me something went wrong.

 

hence the RAMdisk.

regardless of this compression nonsense, i was able to do an awesome montage from just a single game, heres the link. this was just with fraps but the other recorder is actually alot better.

Inside the Fire