Pretty much, the only downside is that Shadowplay is only compatible with NVIDIA cards, which is why I mentioned Raptr.

With OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) you can decide to record in monitor/screen capture, which will record everything that is shown on your screen, or you can choose window capture to record everything that is going on in a certain window of your choice.

Well quite simply in order to cut out content you have key frames (containing a whole picture) and iFrames (differences). You can cut any frames after a keyframe and be fine, but if you start in the middle after a keyframe, all frames will be lost til the next key-frame. Once selections are made you can chop them out, and when you save it is basically a file copy except ignoring the unwanted areas. The audio will be chopped as appropriate, I haven't yet had a case where the video de-synced.

So. Once you've opened the file in question, you should first go to the video settings and make sure it has 'Direct Stream Copy'. This keeps the encoding untouched while only copying appropriate frames and audio. Audio is by default direct stream copy so that doesn't need to be touched.

Once you scrub through the video, find the approximate point you want to start and use the key frames to move forward or back. If you hit the home key it marks the beginning of the selection, and end will mark the last frame you are interested in. If there's no beginning selected, frame 0 is defaulted.

Once selected you can hit delete which will remove those frames (changes are only noted and not saved till later). Repeat until all the areas are removed that you want.

Once done go to File and Save as AVI. It doesn't matter if it was mp4, it will work. (Although extracting wav audio from an mp4 will not work and requires a conversion tool). If you've done it right, you can remove commercials, unwanted chunks, beginning endings or miscaptures and save only the wanted footage with no time needed for re-coding.

Cropping, resizing and several useful filters are avaliable, but don't work with direct stream copy. I recommend you experiment.

Thank you all ;)

I'd like to point out that all of that is also possible with Avidemux, which features a bit more user-friendly interface.

1. You simply drop your video into the window to import it. It's also possible to join mutliple videos together simply by putting them there one after another; they have to have the same resolution, though.

2. Use either the "scroll wheel" on the right side or the "next/previous key frame" buttons (marked red) to go to a key frame and hit "Set Marker A" to set the beginning of the cut.

3. Go to the end of what you want to edit out (also on a key frame) and hit "Set Marker B".

4. DELETE.

5. Set all "Output" to "copy" and the "Output format" to whatever the original video format was and hit "Save Video" to export. Don't forget to add the extension (.avi; .mpg; .mp4; etc.) to the file name you want to use.

1) Ditto for VirtualDub, although it complains if the data rates, audio rates, resolutions or encodings are different. So it's a bit more finicky. Then again, AviSynth can resolve those issues if you don't mind re-encoding, but avs's sorta a pain to work with without having the wiki open.

I've used AviDemux before, but i don't remember it ever being too useful. Hmmm for the life of me i only have a few vague remembering impressions of it, so... *Shrugs* Use what works or what you're more comfortable with.

VLC player can capture a video feed of the Windows desktop, full screen OpenGL applications, video streams from the Internet, video capture devices and possibly other sources as well but I don't believe it can capture video from DirectX applications such as most video games at least not by default (might be plugins or something, but not that I'm aware of). It works fairly well for what it does do, but is kind of a deal breaker for capturing video from most video games. Also, while it is truly an amazing Swiss Army Chainsaw(TM) type of application, it's user interface is more designed for being a multimedia player and can be a little awkward and confusing to figure out how to do some of the more advanced functionality so definitely not the best video capture app out there.

A few months ago I did some research to find a 100% free fully functional app that could do video capture from random video games including DirectX with a preference for open source and unfortunately I came up fairly empty handed. VLC player was the best I personally was able to find and it was unable to capture video from the games I wanted to capture so I ended up without a full solution. It did work good for what it did do, but that wasn't what I ultimately needed at the time unfortunately. :) Still it's worth looking at just to know what it can do as it is free and open source.

The only apps I could find that actually had features that I wanted were various commercial applications that cost money to get the full featured version that doesn't have limitations that restrict the usefulness. Since my usage case is pretty much just whimsical non-commercial use similar to taking random screenshots in a video game, it's not crucial to have the functionality, definitely not something I'd want to pay money for. So I ended up never finding a solution in the end.

If anyone knows of a good free app (open source or otherwise) that can record DirectX video game videos without time limits or other restrictions/limitations that I somehow managed to overlook though, that'd be awesome. As far as I was able to determine though, most people seem to be using either FRAPS or Twitch, neither of which seem to meet all of my desired criteria.

In the end even though it doesn't do exactly what I wanted, I ended up just using Steam live broadcasting a few times as it is free and built into Steam and was able to share video with others live rather than recorded which served my purposes a few times. Would be nice to have a proper free video capture app that could handle it all though.

When hardware acceleration is involved it can be difficult to do capturing. An unfortunate truth... Although there might be workarounds to force it to work, they could be inherently slower and could easily give huge performance issues making the game visually unacceptable.

Perhaps another option is avaliable. RTU has recommended hardware solution(s) where you plug the video output to a hard drive and simply raw record everything, then edit the footage out that you don't want. That will almost always work, although it is not a free solution as it's still hardware.

Perhaps something to consider... When the game is running find out how many cores your game is using. If it's a single core game and you have issues capturing (delays and hickups in video/audio feed) then manually assigning a single CPU/core to the game and the remainder to the encoder/capture will probably resolve that issue.

Waking up the topic from its sleep.

I read everything and installed OBS. Its a perfect program for recording screen. However, I couldnt manage to record my games with it. It only records black screen. Is there a way to make it record games (open GL) ?



I tried Fraps and Dxtory but the file sizes are huge. Besides they are not free. I dont want to make a 3 minute video with 5 GBs of space. So, which program do you recommend for GAME recording?

I've heard that Open Brodcaster Software (OBS) can be used to capture and record video.

https://obsproject.com/

Shadowplay.
Can't you turn down the quality if you're concerned about file sizes?

shadowplay is amazing for recording. The fact that you can have the option to start recording at the touch of a button, or press a button and it will record 'backwards'. Depending on the time you set.

Say if I'm gaming and I suddenly run into a big battle. Upon finishing the battle I can record the last 5 minutes (example) up to that point.

It even allows for desktop recording, frame rate display, camera capture etc...
edit: shit sorry, I didn't see how old this was.

It's true that Shadowplay only works with nVidia GPUs, but not with all of them.
For Shadowplay capabilities you'll need: "GeForce GTX class GPUs 900, 700, 600, 900M, 800M, 700M, select 600M Series"

Source: http://www.geforce.com/geforce-experience/system-requirements

You are right. Shadowplay needs a GTX GPU. I will keep that in mind next time i am buying a laptop.