wcap

Simple and efficient screen recording utility for Windows.

Get latest binary here: wcap.exe (WARNING: Windows Defender or other AV software might report false positive detection)

Features

• press Ctrl + PrintScreen to start recording current monitor (where mouse cursor currently is positioned)
• press Ctrl + Win + PrintScreen to start recording currently active window
• press Ctrl + Shift + PrintScreen to select & record fixed position area on current monitor
• press any of previous combinations to stop recording
• right or double-click on tray icon to change settings
• video encoded using H264/AVC or H265/HEVC, with 10-bit support for HEVC
• audio encoded using AAC or FLAC
• for window capture can capture full window area (including title bar/borders) or just the client area
• optionally exclude mouse cursor from capture
• can limit recording length in seconds or file size in MB's
• can limit max width, height or framerate - captured frames will be automatically downscaled

Details

wcap uses Windows.Graphics.Capture API available since Windows 10 version 1903, May 2019 Update (19H1) to capture contents of window or whole monitor. Captured texture is submitted to Media Foundation to encode video to mp4 file with hardware accelerated codec. Using capture from compositor and hardware accelerated encoder allows it to consume very little CPU and memory.

You can choose in settings to capture only client area or full size of window - client area will not include title bar and borders for standard windows style. Recorded video size is determined by initial window size.

Make sure your GPU drivers are updated if something is not working with hardware video encoding - by default hardware encoder is enabled, you can disable it in settings - then video will be encoded using Microsoft Media Foundation H264 software encoder. You might want to explicitly use software encoder on older GPU's as their hardware encoder quality is not great.

H265 encoding might require installing HEVC package from Microsoft Store - copy following link into Explorer address bar, or in Start->Run dialog:

windows-store://pdp/?ProductId=9n4wgh0z6vhq

Audio is captured using WASAPI loopback recording and encoded using Microsoft Media Foundation AAC encoder, or undocumented Media Foundation FLAC encoder (it seems it always is present in Windows 10).

Recorded mp4 file can be set to use fragmented mp4 format in settings (only for H264 codec). Fragmented mp4 file does not require "finalizing" it. Which means that in case application or GPU driver crashes or if you run out of disk space then the partial mp4 file will be valid for playback. The disadvantage of fragmented mp4 file is that it is a bit larger than normal mp4 format, and seeking is slower.

You can use settings dialog to restrict max resolution of video - captured image will be scaled down to keep aspect ratio if you set any of max width/height settings to non-zero value. Similarly framerate of capture can be reduced to limit maximum amount of frames per second. Setting it to zero will use compositor framerate which is typically monitor refresh rate. Lower video framerate will give higher quality video for same bitrate and reduced GPU usage. If you notice too many dropped frames during recording, try reducing video resolution and framerate.

Capture of mouse cursor in video can be disabled only when using Windows 10 version 2004, May 2020 Update (20H1) or newer.

Creating gif from mp4

If you want to create gif file out of recorded mp4 file, you can use following .bat file:

ffmpeg.exe -hide_banner -nostdin -loglevel fatal -stats -y -i %1 -filter_complex "[0]fps=15,split[v0][v1];[v0]palettegen=stats_mode=full[p];[v1][p]paletteuse" %~n1.gif

And to use new palette every frame to have more colors, but larger file size:

ffmpeg.exe -hide_banner -nostdin -loglevel fatal -stats -y -i %1 -filter_complex "[0]fps=15,split[v0][v1];[v0]palettegen=stats_mode=single[p];[v1][p]paletteuse=new=1" %~n1.gif

Put this line in make_gif.bat file, place ffmpeg executable next to it and then simply drag & drop .mp4 file on top of it. Change fps=15 to desired gif fps (or remove to use original video fps). Check the paletteuse filter arguments for different dither methods.

Building

To build the binary from source code, have Visual Studio installed, and simply run build.cmd.

Changelog

2022.11.06

• remove notifications on start & stop of capture
• remove Windows 10 version check on startup, code always assumes Windows 10
• support for 10-bit HEVC encoding

License

This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain.

Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or distribute this software, either in source code form or as a compiled binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any means.