How to record videos of osu!

See also: Livestreaming osu!

While there are countless ways to record videos of osu!, this guide will cover one of the simplest options using OBS Studio.

Settings

Auto-configuration wizard

When you launch OBS Studio for the first time, the auto-configuration wizard will open.

On the Usage Information screen, choose Optimize for recording, streaming is secondary and click Next.

On the Video Settings screen, set Base (Canvas) Reesolution to your monitor's native resolution, and set FPS to 60. You can also use Either 60 or 30, but prefer 60 when possible, but if your computer struggles to maintain 60 FPS, you likely will struggle to record high-quality osu! videos.

On the Final Results screen, OBS Studio will list automatically selected settings based on your computer's specs. Click Apply Settings to continue.

Additional settings

By default, OBS Studio outputs .mkv files. While this is ideal if OBS unexpectedly crashes or you use separate audio channels, many video editing programs don't handle .mkv files, so changing output to .mp4 is recommended.

In Settings, go to the Output tab on the left, change Output Mode from Simple to Advanced, then click the Recording tab on the top. From here, change Recording Format from Matroska Video (.mkv) to MPEG-4 (.mp4).

Screen recording is a balance of performance and output quality. While this depends on your hardware, below are some things to consider:

• Video Encoder has a big impact on performance and output quality. Experiment with these to see which works best for your setup.
• Bitrate loosely equates to recording quality. Setting this number higher will make output quality higher and increase performance strain.
• If your recording settings are more intense than your computer can handle, a warning will be shown in the bottom left of OBS Studio. In this case, you will also likely be able to see lag during video playback.

As a point of reference, these are the settings used for videos on the osu! YouTube channel

Recording

On OBS Studio's main screen, you will see a Scenes box and a Sources box. Any scene can be composed of multiple sources, but for the sake of this tutorial, only one source will be added: your osu! window.

An empty scene is created by default. To add to the scene, click the + icon in the Sources section, then select Game Capture. You can also use Display Capture, but this can cause latency issues, so it is not recommended.

In the Create/Select Source popup, select Create new and click OK. On the following screen titled Properties for 'Game Capture':

• If you run osu! fullscreen, set Mode to Capture any fullscreen window
• If you run osu! borderless or windowed, change Mode to Capture specific window, then open the game and find [osu!.exe]: osu! in the Window dropdown.

If you see a black box instead of osu! in the preview window, right click the Game Capture source and try to adjust the window settings.

If your goal is to only record osu! gameplay, you likely want to mute the Mic/Aux section of the Audio Mixer by clicking the sound icon.

OBS Studio's other default settings are adequate for recording osu! gameplay, so once this is done, OBS Studio should be ready to go!