What's the best screen recording utility?

[Ladyanne3]

I've tried a handful and even on my most powerful machine they seem to lag a little.
What's a really good one?

[Fant0men]

Since I don't know whether or not you're a Windows user, all I can do is recommend what I use as a Linux user, which is SimpleScreenRecorder.

If you need something for Windows, hopefully someone else can answer.

* EDIT* (Come to think of it, there's OBS which is free and open source. You could always try that.)

If your program allows you to fiddle around with video / audio formats, bitrate, framerate and other settings, then you should know there are some codecs that are less demanding of your hardware. Most of the slowdown when recording your desktop is because of compression happening in the background due to lossy formats. FFV1 is a lossless video codec, and will produce less lag / dropped frames but the file sizes are gigantic so you need a lot of HDD space. In the case of audio, I'd use PCM / WAV or FLAC.

Even though this produces huge files, you can encode them to a lossy format after the fact, since the goal is to produce a smooth recording.

As a sidenote regarding framerate. If you record gameplay, you should probably go with 60. Otherwise 30 FPS is fine. The higher your framerate, the bigger the resulting file will be though.

[Ladyanne3]

Since I don't know whether or not you're a Windows user, all I can do is recommend what I use as a Linux user, which is SimpleScreenRecorder.

If you need something for Windows, hopefully someone else can answer.

* EDIT* (Come to think of it, there's OBS which is free and open source. You could always try that.)

If your program allows you to fiddle around with video / audio formats, bitrate, framerate and other settings, then you should know there are some codecs that are less demanding of your hardware. Most of the slowdown when recording your desktop is because of compression happening in the background due to lossy formats. FFV1 is a lossless video codec, and will produce less lag / dropped frames but the file sizes are gigantic so you need a lot of HDD space. In the case of audio, I'd use PCM / WAV or FLAC.

Even though this produces huge files, you can encode them to a lossy format after the fact, since the goal is to produce a smooth recording.

As a sidenote regarding framerate. If you record gameplay, you should probably go with 60. Otherwise 30 FPS is fine. The higher your framerate, the bigger the resulting file will be though.

Simplescreenrecorder seems really good.  A great score for my linux machine!
OBS is proving to be a pain.  I need to capture 3 hours of footage but obs shuts down after a few moments for unknown reasons.

[Koziol]

I think OBS Studio

if only windows
Screen Recorder Pro
https://www.apowersoft.com/screen-recorder.html

[Major Paiyne]

I prefer Camtasia Studio in most cases, especially for creating tutorials and or guides. OBS is good for streaming imo and good ole Fraps is still the king of straight recording for games imo. For Windows anyways...

[gulshan212]

Well, there are many screen recording utilities available for different operating system such as Window, MAC and Linux and many others. Some of them which are most used and popular are OBS, ShareX and Snagit.
Thanks

[dueda]

One trick is to have a separate disk unit (HDD/SSD) just for the recording, preferably on a separate channel - Almost every motherboard, even laptops, have two disk channels.
Yep, not what you asked, but may be a cheap option to improve quality. If you're not doing it already.

M2/NVme is better, Thunderbolt/USB4 is good, USB3.2 is fair, avoid SATA if possible.
That, or have a lot of RAM, like 128GB; even make a RAMdisk. But then there may be less expensive solutions.