5 Quality Desktop Screen Recorders for PC, Mac, Linux

Summary: A good beginning is half the battle! For anyone who calls for high quality desktop recording, a decent screen recorder is a must-have.

Why are you putting your efforts online for such a desktop screen recorder? Well, let me just unlease my imagination here: you are a vlog starter and want to set out your web celebrity journey with some tutorials or Let’s Play game sessions; you are an online educator and need to record your lessons with your voice and face on the desktop; you are a student or a common user and want to move some online sources to your disk for watching without limit; or you just plan to record any crucial business meeting, personal conversation or similar for reliving later… There’s no limit to my imagination. However, since time is precious, no matter what’s your case, you’ve come into the right place, because we have rounded up some best desktop screen recorders for all mainstream desktop systems – Windows 10/8/7, Mac and Linux. Please be patient to read on about them.

1. RecMaster – Easiest Desktop Screen Recorder for Both Windows & Mac

Supported OS: Windows 10/8(.1)/7/XP, Mac OS X 10.11 or above

For newbies, it’s recommended to employ an easy-to-use and high quality screen recording app just like RecMaster. By using this kind of software, you can work out an excellent screen capture video or audio effortlessly in clicks. Compared to common rivals, RecMaster offers multiple clearer recording modes to meet any possible recording needs, such as filming gameplay, full desktop, specific area/windowed program, multi-monitor capture, video with webcam & audio, and only the webcam/audio. Attached tools like schedule recording, annotation drawing board and video editor empower you to carry out auto-recording and personalize your work with ease. Of course before the capture, you are free to set video size, format, quality and cursor effect.

Guide: How to Record Screen with RecMaster

2. OBS Studio – Best Free Desktop Screen Recorder for Windows, Mac and Linux

Supported OS: Windows 10/8.1/8, macOS 10.13+, Linux
Download: https://obsproject.com/download

When coming up with free screen recording software, the general public, including both users and editors, agree that OBS Studio is the most powerful open source entity for recording and streaming. As to screencast, you can add as many sources and scenes as you like and switch between them freely for montage effect with OBS Studio. The various packed settings on video and audio give you an ultimate control on the output looking. If you have more than one audio source, for example you are interviewing several people with independent mics, OBS could save the audio tracks separately and output multi-audio-track file for an easier post production. Any recorded format can be remuxed to MP4 automatically once you tick the option under Advanced control.

Tips: Best OBS Settings for Recording 1080p/720P 60fps Video etc.

3. Fraps – Most Lightweight Desktop Screen Recorder for Windows

Supported OS: officially claimed for Windows XP, 2003, Vista, and Windows 7
Download: https://www.fraps.com/download.php

Fraps is a real-time screen capture tool that you can use to take excellent screenshots and video capture. Designed especially for DirectX/OpenGL gameplay capture, Fraps supports grabbing audio and game/movie moments at up to 7680×4800 resolution with frame rate adjustable at any value between 1 – 120 fps. You can also choose to capture the full size or half size as output, leverage the “Force lossless RGB capture” to export recording with much higher quality. And as a benchmarking program, Fraps will show you the real FPS on the screen corner and help you measure the performance. Unfortunately, with less updates in recent years, it seems a little bit behindhand in terms of interface, capture settings and system compatibility, especially for Windows 10. >> Is Fraps Still Worthy A Shot on Windows 10?

4. Built-in Tool of Sytem – Most Convenient Desktop Screen Recorder Without Download/Install

Game bar is the notable bundled recording tool of Windows 10 system. Modeled from Xbox app, it’s able to take crisp gameplay videos with audio easily. Besides, it still embraces all the other non-game programs except the whole desktop and file explorer.

Speak of game capture, if you are avid player, in all probability, your computer has high-power graphic cards from Nvidia or AMD. In this case, in your free GPU driver updater there’s such built-in screen capture gadget like Nvidia Shadowplay and AMD Radeon ReLive.

Mac system doesn’t have such built-in dedicated screen recorder but a player with screen capture feature. Yep, it’s QuickTime. By using the “New Screen Recording” function under File drop-down list, you can produce your screen capture with built-in microphone. Computer sound can be taken alongside once you install a virtual sound card such as soundflower.
Like QuickTime player, VLC is also preloaded with a device capture functionality to record DirectShow, TV – digital and the desktop. The biggest pro is that it can not only output raw footage, but also convert the raw into MP4, TS, MP3 or other formats with customized codec, size, bit rate, fps etc.

5. Screencastify – Best Desktop Screen Recorder Plug-in for Chrome Browser

Supported OS: Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS
Download: https://www.screencastify.com/

There are a wealth of online desktop recording services and extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Most of them share the similar abilities, for instance browser tab capture, the entire desktop capture, a certain application desktop window capture and webcam capture only. Here Screencastify is out pick due to its pleased UI, and popularity among teachers and students. No system requirement, no matter what computer you are working with, you can make the most of it with only a Chrome operation.

Guide: How to Use Screencastify on Your Computer

In Closing

After finishing this best desktop screen recorder list that includes choices for all software types, you must have your own idea on which one is more suitable for you. We hope no matter your are a budding or a professional movie maker, you can make your video stand out, starting with a solid screencast.

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