Mayayana wrote:

Then I guess the search continues. I'm mostly
on XP, like you, so I haven't tried some of the
options available, like OBS. I think the bytescout
program saved as WMV9 and that didn't seem
different in size from the mp4 from videotool, but
I didn't do a careful comparison. And as I noted,
the bytescout program was slightly spywarish,
trying to call home to Cloudflare at least once.

I'm surprised you haven't written your own by now :-)

There's a couple options for hardware-related capture.
NVidia have their own Shadowplay for screen capture.
On AMD, we have to rely on the capture feature in
MSI Afterburner (which may be a good thing in that
it's less hardware specific - Afterburn is for both
AMD and NVidia).

*******

Apparently Shadowplay for NVidia cards has an option
to record the desktop (instead of sticking with just
game recording). But, not only is it restricted to
NVidia (the OP was AMD), but it's also limited to
certain models.

https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answ...rd-gameplay%3F

GeForce Experience Share uses the dedicated accelerator
for video encoding called NVENC found on Kepler
GeForce 600 series and higher GPUs. For optimal
experience, a GeForce GTX 650 or higher is required.

For more information please visit:

http://www.geforce.com/geforce-exper...m-requirements

The main advantage of that, is the zero CPU load. As
it uses the encoder on the video card to make the
output file smaller.

*******

The closest AMD gets is "MSI Afterburner", which doesn't
list screen recording, but the function is there... somewhere.
They mention a term here "Play.TV" but I don't know what that is.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/co...to_shadowplay/

The release notes could use a rewrite.

https://www.guru3d.com/files-details...-download.html

The setup for the screen recorder is shown here. This individual
set his to "uncompressed" during capture, which implies it
isn't using a video card compression method. Maybe it's only for
games, but that's something a person could test and see.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMMW0HkOaQU

Paul