Author Topic: What are the best emulators for directly capturing video?  (Read 12124 times)

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Offline JonLeung

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What are the best emulators for directly capturing video?
« on: May 29, 2020, 09:44:30 pm »
I haven't played with emulators much lately but I have been doing more with video... (If you didn't know, I have a YouTube channel under the name "JonLeung1".)

I am wondering if there are some good emulators (primarily for the popular consoles) that can output gameplay directly to a video file (such as an .AVI or .MP4) with really good quality and at the same resolution and frame rate as the game.

I'm not doing speedruns, I'm not doing live-streaming.  I'm not doing anything fancy, I just want something as simple as "hit record, play some of a game, hit stop" and then have a file of game footage to work with in any video editor.

I know there is generic video capture software, but I feel that would be a pain to set up for the resolution and frame rate.  And I do have capture hardware if I were to do anything with HDMI, sure, but again, that usually only captures at particular resolutions and I want the perfect resolution and frame rate and it sounds like something emulators could probably do more directly.

Someone here surely has more experience than me, so does anyone have any suggestions?
« Last Edit: May 30, 2020, 05:26:55 am by JonLeung »

Offline TerraEsperZ

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Re: What are the best emulators for directly capturing video?
« Reply #1 on: May 29, 2020, 11:37:06 pm »
I honestly have no idea myself but I know where you might find a satisfying answer...

You should ask around on the TASvideos Forums. Given the focus of the site on tool-assisted speedruns, many contributors there could give you good recommendations for whatever system you're trying to capture video from. I bet their pet emulator BizHawk is very good for that purpose although I've never tried making a video with it.
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