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    Tech question: Screen Recording

    I'm wondering if anyone with software knowledge can help where Google has not helped. I've been having a conversation with one of my friends about image quality when using a screen capture recording program. He uses Bandicam on PC. I've used Screenflow on a Mac. To my eyes, a screen capture of a streaming HD video looks worse compared to a recording device like Avermedia, which is basically recording the stream and making an MP4 file (modem > streaming box like Roku or Amazon Fire Stick > Avermedia > portable HDD). My theory (and this is where I'm looking for some help from the braintrust) is that screen capture is basically recording the image and so the output is a lower quality. Kind of like playing music from your stereo and recording the music with your computer versus ripping/dragging and dropping the audio file with a computer and ending up with an exact copy. The screen capture is making a video, not pulling from the stream.

    Is this an accurate summary of screen capturing or is a program like Bandicam actually grabbing a stream and my eyes are tricking me because I think the screen capture should look worse?

    #2
    With the likes of Bandicam, that is pretty much exactly like what you've described.

    It's pretty obvious when you see videos that have been uploaded to YouTube and the like - the capture window won't have been cropped for the content properly; you can see the mouse cursor and error messages appear; compression artifacts, frame rate issues and audio glitches rear their ugly head.
    Not to mention the watermarks.

    It's usually the case that the people most keen to use it are the people least likely to know how to use it properly.

    Still infinitely preferable to camera-pointed-at-screen-o-vision, of course.

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      #3
      I've tended to use simple programs that just recorded the screen and spit out a giant uncompressed mp4 file. The main issue then is how to compress the thing (H.264 and H.265 were the most effective).

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        #4
        Can't speak to Screenflow, but certainly for Bandicam (and Quicktime on Mac), it's just recording the screen and encoding a new video file. You can adjust the quality settings (and the codec, in Bandicam), but it's always going to be lossy. If you want to actually capture the underlying video stream, you either need software to rip and probably de-DRM the streaming video file, if there is one), or realistically dedicated videocapture hardware that can take a raw stream in realtime (which will have ginormous file sizes, BTW).

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          #5
          There are IPTV players that grab the stream coming from the IPTV provider that spit out files with the same specs to a portable HDD (usually TS files). And my sense is that if you have the M3U line for a stream, you can plug that into VLC and VLC will spit out a TS file. In this case, my friend is comparing video that screen caps a stream through a subscription website (DAZN) versus recording the stream from the APP via an Avermedia recorder (modified to cut out flags). The samples he sent me certainly show that the video from the App is lower quality than what he gets from other channels on his satellite*** but the Bandicam image is very jittery, which makes the file worse (to the point that I don't really see that this stream would look better than what is coming through his app).

          ***I don't think his situation is unique. In the US, ESPN+ is the only sports streaming app that is consistently excellent for football. The other options are hit and miss and none (other than ESPN+) are on par quality-wise with the channels on my satellite.

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