what is the cheapest way to record/stream your screen while you game dev?

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gamedev4life

Guest
like all hardcore game devs, i spend a lot of time developing my game (painting/animating, creating levels, mapping out state machines, etc) and i really want to record the whole process of it so i can make videos for a dev log, youtube and all that, BUT i have almost no money :(

im looking for software/hardware suggestions, websites to post/publish to, and other methods that can allow me to record, stream, edit videos, etc which are either free or affordable. can anyone help me w that?

again, this is for recording/streaming hours of video at a time...yea, u all know what i mean lol

atm im using demo fraps (which sucks bc you can only record 30 secs at a time), windows movie maker, photoshop and gm pro (thanks humble bundle!)

gracias :)
 
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41nd

Guest
OBS is great and its development is really really good/fast/improving. If you want something more easy to setup and stream you can buy Xsplit premium licenses for a year for 5-6 usd on gray-markets.
 
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renex

Guest
OBS is really confusing to set up, so I recommend you take a look at configuration tutorials. But I recommend it anyway, it's the most customizable of them and works really well for me.
 

GMWolf

aka fel666
I really wouldnt say OBS is confusing: sure, its not click and record our of the box, but thats the great thing about it: it makes configuring a essential part of the software. That means that when you do want something a little more complex than just a simple full screen recording, you can easily find everything you need.
Other software will make a simple recording easy, but as soon as you want to configure, its either not possible, or you have to dig through many menus because they didnt want to make their software lok 'complicated'.

As everyone esle said: OBS truely is great. Invest the ~10 minutes it takes to learn the software and you will be set for anykinf od recordings you may need.
 
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gamedev4life

Guest
thanks all!

what about hardware, should i record to a flash drive or external hard drive?
 

GMWolf

aka fel666
thanks all!

what about hardware, should i record to a flash drive or external hard drive?
I record on a large external hard drive i have, but flash drive would work too.
Anything is fine as long as its fast enough.

One tip: if you have the cpu power, choose a good encoding algorithm like h264/h265 when recording, so that it doesnt take up too much space or bandwidthand. unless you plan on doing some high quality editing, you can already set the compression to just above final so that you dont end up with massive files.
I used to record with close to no compression because my cpu wasnt good enough. The problem i got was that i ended up with massive, 40 Gig per houre video files... not nice.


[edit] yeah, for hours at a time, i would almost consider using a lower bitrate, like 8Mbps at 1080p 30fps.
 
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renex

Guest
Plain computer usage videos don't spend nearly as much bandwidth as gameplay because most of the screen is identical between frames, so a higher quality is achievable with the same settings. However, a slow hard drive can cause skipping on the video. You'll have to tweak until you find a setting that works for your hardware - for example, I spent over a week fine-tuning OBS so I could record dolphin at 60 fps.

Gotta get those sweet smash replays on the tubes.
 
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