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Ask HN: Why isn't there a simple, seemless Windows screen recording app?

8 points by BraverHeart ↗ HN
Seriously, I looked everywhere and I couldn't find anything that does the following in a straight forward way and with minimalist UI:

- Shortcut to show region selection (Something like taking a screenshot in Windows (SHIFT+WIN+S)

- After region selection, start recording immediately

- Stop recording and save in a predefined location

Features:

- Configure in advance whether to save as MP3 or GIF

Every tool I tried is either too bloated or has some extra steps that ruins the fluidity of the UX.

The closest thing I found is LiceCap, but this tool is GIF exclusive and has extra UI steps.

For someone that takes screen recordings every day, any tool becomes too tedious.

I wish I could build it myself, but time constraints.

15 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 36.9 ms ] thread
PaulHoule
It may be more than you want by I swear by

https://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.html

I use it for screenshots, demos, bug reports and other software dev tasks.

For other work I think the capture functionality is great but if I really need to edit video I will load it into Adobe Premier.

BraverHeart
Thank you for the suggestion, but I would file this under too bloated for the job in terms of features and size. I mean LiceCap is less than 1MB in size and it does a third of what's needed, Snagit is a 300Mb+ download!
PaulHoule
How does the bloat really affect you?
BraverHeart
I don't have a rational answer for this, it just seems that such a simple task, would need a simple solution.

Just downloading and installing this took minutes and kind of stressed my computer and when I finally tried to launch it, it asked me to sign up before I can use it, so I abandoned and uninstalled it.

I can't recommend this to someone else, when it has such a barrier to entry.

PaulHoule
I see it as a valuable tool I use for my work.

I paid for a license when I was self employed and my current employer has a procurement deal with TechSmith and bought me a license for my work laptop.

rococode
ShareX can do this.

It lets you select a region + record with one hotkey, detects window borders and snap to those as regions, optionally converts between gif/mp4, and uploads to a variety of sites. Also handles screenshots with a quick built-in image editor, file uploads, and more. <10MB total size so fairly lightweight.

It's open source, too!

https://getsharex.com/

thomastay
Consider Captura: https://mathewsachin.github.io/Captura/ and if that doesn't work for you, you can always fork it.

Warning: there are a lot of Captura clones in the Microsoft store, download it only from Github.

BraverHeart
Not bad! The closest solution to what I wanted, unfortunate that it's no longer maintained :-(, any idea what happened?
Saris
ShareX fits the bill. Also a fantastic screenshot tool. And will auto upload to tons of different online services, your own services, or just store locally.
BraverHeart
Thank you, this looks interesting, though it has a lot of other features.