You can also choose to break long recordings up into chunks – a brilliant touch that helps you avoid creating huge, unwieldy files. There’s no limit on the length of your recordings unless you choose to set one, which can be useful if there’s a chance you might accidentally leave the recorder running.

The recorder can automatically obscure passwords entered on screen, replace your silly wallpaper with a plain one, hide messy desktop icons, and highlight your mouse pointer to make it easier to follow. There's also a dedicated gaming mode that lets you define the number of frames recorded per second. That’s all fairly standard fare for a free screen recorder, but take a minute to dive into Flashback’s advanced options and you’ll find a wealth of thoughtfully designed settings that will make your desktop recordings look truly professional. Once you’ve finished, your recording will appear in a simple editor, where you can crop and trim it to suit your needs, then export it to YouTube, an FTP server, or your PC. You can record from your whole screen, a window, a selected area, or a webcam.

Its interface is less intimidating than OBS Studio, so if you've never used a screen recorder before, it's an excellent choice. Despite being a free version of a paid program, FlashBack Express won't put ugly watermarks over your recordings or impose time limits, and it's packed with features and tools that rival many premium programs. OBS Studio is our favorite free screen recorder, but Flashback Express comes an extremely close second. It might take a little while to set it up exactly how you want, but OBS Studio is by far the best and most powerful screen recorder for gamers. OBS Studio can also make full use of multi-core CPUs for improved performance, and can record at 60FPS (or even higher). You can stream live to Twitch or YouTube gaming, save projects and come back to them later, or encode your footage in FLV format and save it locally.īecause OBS Studio can record directly from your graphics card, it’s able to capture games running in full-screen mode (many other screen recorders can only record if the game is windowed), with customizable hotkeys to control the recording. OBS Studio supports both streaming and recording in high definition, with no restrictions on the number or length of your creations.

Unlike the hugely popular FRAPS (which only lets you record for 30 seconds at a stretch unless you’ve bought a license, and applies a watermark to the resulting footage), OBS Studio is open source, and completely free to use without restrictions. If you’re a keen gamer, OBS Studio is easily the best free screen recorder for you.

Best free recording software