Recording videos: what are you guys using ?

[Devile]

Always used Xsplit Broadcaster. Got a lifetime license on sale a while ago and never tried anything else. I also have an nVidia GPU but never tried Shadowplay. Last video I recorded was from yesterday and used a couple options I never tried before from Xplit: NVENC codec and Optimize for Youtube which I have no idea what it does. The NVENC codec uses the GPU for encoding so my game was a LOT smoother compared to the default codec and at 1080p 60fps, a 10 minute video was around 2.6GB.

I tried to record the desktop a while ago but it was PAINFUL. I was able to capture my DxNothing with all my VideoFX but my FPS ingame were crap. Haven't tried again, but if it's the same case, don't think it's playable like that. I was doing 20-30fps back then.

PD: Reading about NVENC seems like quality is pretty bad compared to x264 and even Quick Sync. I'll give Quick Sync a try and see how much better it looks and if the file is much bigger or not.

[MiRai]

Always used Xsplit Broadcaster. Got a lifetime license on sale a while ago and never tried anything else. I also have an nVidia GPU but never tried Shadowplay. Last video I recorded was from yesterday and used a couple options I never tried before from Xplit: NVENC codec and Optimize for Youtube which I have no idea what it does. The NVENC codec uses the GPU for encoding so my game was a LOT smoother compared to the default codec and at 1080p 60fps, a 10 minute video was around 2.6GB.

I tried to record the desktop a while ago but it was PAINFUL. I was able to capture my DxNothing with all my VideoFX but my FPS ingame were crap. Haven't tried again, but if it's the same case, don't think it's playable like that. I was doing 20-30fps back then.

PD: Reading about NVENC seems like quality is pretty bad compared to x264 and even Quick Sync. I'll give Quick Sync a try and see how much better it looks and if the file is much bigger or not.

NVENC is what Shadow Play uses, but I've never had good results when manually adjusting NVENC through any program (BandiCam, Action, or OBS), and I've certainly tried. Here's a quality test I did with Shadow Play and Far Cry 4 with my personalized recording/encoding settings just two weeks ago, and if you watch it at, at least, 1440p quality (even if you only have a 1080p display), the quality is, in my opinion, absolutely fantastic for as much high-level detail needs to be retained for that game to look good. Also, you can watch any of my recent multiboxing videos that are in 4K quality, and they're all recorded with Shadow Play.

However, anytime I've read about NVENC not being up to par is when people were trying to use it through a non-nVidia recording program or trying to do live streaming with it (or using their live streaming settings and recording locally), and at that point you should probably still be using H./x264 for that.

If I have any issues with Shadow Play it's that I can't choose to record in a bitrate higher than 130Mbps, and that mouse clicks aren't visualized, but other than that it's been adopted as my new recording program. I don't mean to sound like an nVidia rep/fanboy because I was incredibly skeptical that some "shitty" NVENC setup was going to be the answer to my quality (and storage) issues (because it was terrible through all the other programs I tried it in), but when I tried it through Shadow Play and realized that I was wrong, I was incredibly happy.