Guild Wars 2

Does anyone have any suggestions for good capture software that works well with GW2?

I’ve used MSI Afterburner but it’s output is fuzzy. I tried using the uncompressed setting with a mkv container but couldn’t find any software to read the file. Which kind of sucks because I have a recording of a glitch in the Verdant Brink map where my ranger was endlessly spinning on a mushroom.

I use Bandicam. It works well for my needs and I have no complaints about it.

If you have an Nvidia card, I highly recommend trying the built in Shadowplay recorder. Use a ramdisk as temporary storage (assuming you have 16-32gb ram) and you can easily record the past 5-10 minutes in HQ with a button click.

If you have AMD, I think there is something similar but I am not familiar with that.

You don’t have to use a ramdisk. Where did you get this idea from?
I write to a regular HDD which also holds the game files and despite it sounds like I/O bottleneck, it ain’t, because during loading screens there is not much to render (and thus to be processed) and else everything’s cached (that’s what a loading sequence is for after all).

I am recording with 50 Mbit/s (at 60 fps) – that is 6 MByte/s. Even my old Seagate from 1999 could reach this value. Also remember that is only a maximum limit, the MP4 decoding will compress it even further, so the actual amount of data is significantly lower.

35 MBit/s at 60 fps can also work, but you might get macroblocking at fast movements or blurrs with certain colours (red, green). Just standard MPEG-encoding issues.

As far as I know, ShadowPlay’s encoder uses a part of the GPU that is idling otherwise, so there is no performance drop. If you want to record in the “shadows”, which means a permanent background recording, you could run out of VRAM though.

ShadowPlay has 3 modes:
Off – Turns off. Does not require anything. Duh.^^
Shadow – Records everything into VRAM. You can set a timespan, e.g. 1 minute. If you hit a certain combination, that 1 minute is read from the VRAM and written to your disk. Cool for example in games where you don’t know when something cool will happen but overwrites the file when the timespan is over. Like a rubber band. Can eat serious junks of your VRAM, which should not be a problem in GW2 though.
Manual – Records only when you hit a certain combination (e.g. Alt+F9). Good when you know what will happen and when you want to record on purpose. Only takes a little of VRAM when enabled.

VLC player will play MKV files no problem.

i use OBS open broadcaster… its free open source.
google OBS local recording for settings on youtube. cuz local recording settings are different from streaming settings.

black sun empress.7401:

VLC player will play MKV files no problem.

i use OBS open broadcaster… its free open source.
google OBS local recording for settings on youtube. cuz local recording settings are different from streaming settings.

I wouldn’t play uncompressed mkv generated by MSI Afterburner. It has a problem with some of the compressed ones on color rendering. I thought it was the file but Nero Recode processes them fine but of course by the time they have been reprocessed and uploaded the look horrible. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA9KoXRtjsc

Playing back the file it had a big yellow stripe and other colors was off with VLC player. I wish I could recover that uncompressed one because it showed that spinning bug. It was amusing. I’ll have to try bandicam. I do have a 60gb SSID I could use for recording. I’ll have to put it in the PC next time I have it tore down.

OBS would do the trick nicely for free. I use it for all of my streams and youtube video productions. Google the Open Broadcast Software Project. Lots of addons. You can record locally or broadcast to another location.

Another vote for OBS. Free, easy to set up, and it doesn’t put a logo on your vids like Bandicam does.

Yeah, OBS is pretty solid

I tried OBS. I’m going to have to play with it more. It seems more CPU intensive. I’ll probably have to upgrade my gfx card soon. Any suggestions?

What are your current specs?

AMD FX 8150 8 core processor/24gb ram and an ancient AMD Radeon HD 6570 gfx card.

Is there any decent lightweight program that I could use to record some pvp matches? I never attempted anything like that so I would appreciate all the help.

I’m using 1,5 year old laptop:
i7 4th gen
840m
8gb ram
240gb ssd 540 r&w

OBS is very lightweight, if it is able to use some hardware encoder. For me it has approx. 8-10% CPU usage recording a 1080×1200 video at 30 fps. Quicksync for Intel CPUs (even if you use an extra graphics card), NVENC for Nvidia GPUs. It is available, if you can choose it in the encoder dropdown box.

Ramp up the bitrate for local recordings to get a good quality, or better use a quality-based encoding method instead of bitrate-based.

Silmar Alech.4305:

OBS is very lightweight, if it is able to use some hardware encoder. For me it has approx. 8-10% CPU usage recording a 1080×1200 video at 30 fps. Quicksync for Intel CPUs (even if you use an extra graphics card), NVENC for Nvidia GPUs. It is available, if you can choose it in the encoder dropdown box.

Ramp up the bitrate for local recordings to get a good quality, or better use a quality-based encoding method instead of bitrate-based.

Ok, I will try OBS when I home from work. I use resolution of 1600×900, but I can probably make it look normal on 1366×768 too. Beside nVidia 840M this laptop has na integrated Intel HD graphic card.
I have no idea what are you talking about bitrate, probably I will understand when I install the program?

Zedek.8932:

You don’t have to use a ramdisk. Where did you get this idea from?
I write to a regular HDD which also holds the game files and despite it sounds like I/O bottleneck, it ain’t, because during loading screens there is not much to render (and thus to be processed) and else everything’s cached (that’s what a loading sequence is for after all).

I get this idea from the fact that HDDs has been obsolete hardware for years now.

I only have SSDs in my gaming computer and every other computer I own. SSDs however arent ideal to constantly write and read from, so a ramdisk is a more logical option for active back-in-time Shadowplay recording, also given the fact that 16-32gb ram is pretty standard. Unlike what you state, Shadowplay does not use vram for storage. It use a temporary drive location that it will continuously write too. At my settings, I use 3gb out of 16gb ram to record 4 minutes back in time of 60fps 90Mbps 1080p footage.

If you want to record like 2-3 hours of constant footage then sure, use a HDD by all means. I usually only record small clips from roaming fights, duels and skirmishes. Sometimes I combine multiple clips using the tick timer to see when to click the button, lol.

windows 10 as one on board. that you can use on the pc or xbox.

That’s all changed with Windows 10, thanks to a video-record feature baked into the new Game DVR. Press Win+G, and a small bar pops up, with a video-capture button, and links to the Game DVR hub. (The first time you do this in a particular program, Windows will ask you to confirm that the program is a game, before starting Game DVR.)

Hit record (or Win+Alt+R), and it will automatically start capturing video from the program you’ve got open, rather than the entire screen. It’s a feature aimed at gamers (duh) who want to share in-game clips, but it works equally well for sending your grandma a how-to video on using Google.

Even better for gamers: if you enable background recording, Game DVR will constantly record the last 30 seconds of activity in the background when you’re playing a game. If something cool happens, hit Win+Alt+G, and it will save that 30-second snippet.

Also of mention is the new screen capture: Alt+Win+Print Screen now saves a screenshot of a window to the same folder. That might sound like a minor improvement, but it’s a thousand times better than pasting Print-Screens into Paint like the XPers of yore, and even better than the Snipping Tool that ships on more recent versions of Windows.

if you do not have a windows 10 I have read that bandit cam software was one of the best one. other cause lag take to much ressource or you need to pay.

Dawdler.8521:

Zedek.8932:

You don’t have to use a ramdisk. Where did you get this idea from?
I write to a regular HDD which also holds the game files and despite it sounds like I/O bottleneck, it ain’t, because during loading screens there is not much to render (and thus to be processed) and else everything’s cached (that’s what a loading sequence is for after all).

I get this idea from the fact that HDDs has been obsolete hardware for years now.

I only have SSDs in my gaming computer and every other computer I own. SSDs however arent ideal to constantly write and read from, so a ramdisk is a more logical option for active back-in-time Shadowplay recording, also given the fact that 16-32gb ram is pretty standard. Unlike what you state, Shadowplay does not use vram for storage. It use a temporary drive location that it will continuously write too. At my settings, I use 3gb out of 16gb ram to record 4 minutes back in time of 60fps 90Mbps 1080p footage.

If you want to record like 2-3 hours of constant footage then sure, use a HDD by all means. I usually only record small clips from roaming fights, duels and skirmishes. Sometimes I combine multiple clips using the tick timer to see when to click the button, lol.

hdds are not absolete hardware. more slow yes. problem with ssd is that you cannot write erase to often or it reduce the life of the ssd. so file that need to be write erase often you should put on slower hdds.

so ssd is for os and program that are going to stay there. hdds is for storage of content that you might erase photo, video, files, trial programs etc…

I use Dxtory : https://youtu.be/0c9XS0meYzM?list=PLliuInT_bkOy9h5t0wPWDpM3-SzZPnErR

If you got Nvidia GC, Shadowplay is pretty good.

Back when I used Windows, my software of choice for broadcasting was OBS. My software of choice for recording was MSI Afterburner.

For OBS, there is/was an AMD VCE-based version that could be used for AMD GPUs (comparable to Shadowplay), but I didn’t use it (I had a FX-8350; plenty of CPU power to go around even with GW2). MSI Afterburner if I recall correctly could also use a 3rd-party codec for GPU acceleration (but I also didn’t use it there either primarily).

For Linux, I used OBS Studio.