A question I can guarantee that nobody asked when they read my over 35 thousand character rant on Windows, was "I can think of at least several things I'd love this person to rant about in this style!".
Nobody, but me. Because I still have stories to tell.
Game Clipping is an art that recently formed
For those who are unfamiliar, a game "clip" is a short video showing somebody playing a game. This varies from person to person, but usually it's about 15 to 30 seconds of somebody doing something impressive or really funny. Most of the time, instead of using a recording software, you'll just a dedicated "clipping" tool to record a game and save the last 15 seconds at the press of a button. Some recording software will have their own version.
This was not exactly anything new that has formed overnight... Though it definitely was not as popular back in the day! You used to have to go out of your way to make a recording of just the clip you wanted... And you would have factors like human imperfection making it harder to clip it exactly how you wanted.
Though in the past couple of years, especially popularized in 2020 by the rise of short form, usually vertical content, game clipping was born! These dedicated softwares (or if you're old-school/smart, the Replays feature on your existing software) allow you to just play your game, press a button and get the last (x) seconds of whatever you were doing. Which has made it far easier to clip multi-kills, big accomplishments or just plain silly one-in-a-million chances and bugs.
It is a technology I'm pretty sure a lot of us take for granted. It basically simplified recording easter eggs with a click of a button, eliminating the frustration that is hitting 'record', and never seeing it reproduce. It's not a very perfect technology... But it is quite an interesting thing that formed recently, and kind of is another example of human genius creating something convenient rather than practical.
Yeah, it's not very practical to have only 30 seconds of acing a match... But it is really cool, and some people REALLY love consuming this stuff. And for good reason, it's quite an interesting thing!
So what exactly is the problem?
Yet it's bottlenecked by human bias
As it turns out, programming shenanigans.
Just like as I've mentioned in my Windows rant, developers seem to really love creating software with templates and frameworks that only require web development knowledge, rather than trying to bite tooth and nail to optimize anything. After all, what's the point of learning GTK to make an optimized program, when you can use an Electron-like framework and just do the whole thing in HTML instead?
Software like Medal and Outplayed really like to do this. On top of their recorders using being built on OBS (specifically libOBS for the nerds) or similar, they proceed to use frameworks like Electron or Tauri to make a Web UI for it instead, which makes everything feel bloated and awful to use. "Framework" is probably not the word for it, please excuse my lack of vocabulary.
This is a pretty non issue most of the time I feel... When we exclude Outplayed (more on why later), some apps like Medal will just kill most of the heavy elements of the Electron instance and just leaves the Encoder. It is still a problem, but they did at least think about this and try to alleviate it a little bit. It's better than nothing, it at least shows these developers are aware of the implications of laziness. I'm more than happy with that, even if their app kind of sucks.
Though, that still doesn't change much... Because all of your options still suck. Either they overly monetized or lack basic quality of life. So let's pick apart every other option, because why just record 10 seconds when you can overcomplicate it!
Video file sizes imposed by corporations are a joy.
OBS is the most "yours" it gets
Let's start with the biggest head in the room.
For anybody who mostly records, OBS Studio is an open-source recording software that considered one of the most reliable alternatives to software like Bandicam. If you're in the streaming space, you'll recognize this software immediately, as Streamlabs is basically just OBS with a custom frontend UI.
I will exclusively be talking about OBS Studio because it has just the essentials by default and does not have streaming centric features by default (unlike Streamlabs), though you can probably apply anything I say about OBS to Streamlabs, assuming they have said feature I'm about to talk about.
Anyway, OBS has an obscure feature called Replay Buffer, which is pretty much just a free, lightweight version of what most Clipping software has. It uses all of your scenes from OBS, you can set a manual Memory limit, set a custom clip length in seconds, and set a key to save the "buffer", which takes the clip and saves it to your recordings folder.
...And that is about where the fun ends. In its basic, stock state, it actually sucks.
You need addons to restart the buffer because of how notoriously awful it is, getting pretty slippery after hours of buffering at once. There are many utilities for this already, though I use obs-hadowplay for buffer restart and notifications, and Smart Replays for folder renaming... Though you will immediately run into problems with configuring Python, because OBS only accepts Python 3.12 and lower, which, PSA: YOU CAN ONLY GET THE LATEST BUILD BY COMPILING FROM SOURCE.
Another problem I have with OBS's Replay Buffer is inconsistent length. Sometimes it'll capture at the full seconds you set, but sometimes it can be as little as 5 seconds away from your set length!!! This inconsistently pisses me off, and no buffer restart actually fixes the problem. You are forced to live with it. I'm not sure if allocating more memory fixes this problem, but considering I allocated at least a hundred megabytes and the original implementation from years ago also did this, I'm quite at the end of my hopium.
There is also the lack of a file size hard limit, but that is more of a practicality thing. It was a Replays Feature, and was more of a catch. I don't remember what sacrifices it made, but usually I just lower the quality when it goes over. This is pretty negatable anyway, OBS has a lot of really good quality control settings that aren't just "pick a bitrate and we'll even apply it to frames that don't need it!", so it's pretty mitigated. I use CRF and AV1 encoding.
This is about as good as it gets. So... Yikes!
Join an overly monetized social media, get a plastic medal in return
Ugh, I'm almost pissed how much they ruined Medal. If you are unaware, Medal TV is a clip software and social media hybrid that is sort of the "TikTok" of game clips. It shows you a huge grid of clips on the home screen, and you can record your own to upload to the platform. Or you can just use it as a clip software and use the local files instead, if you're old-school and don't mind missing out a little.
I wish I could say good things about Medal... But it has many glaring problems. First of all, the unlisted videos aren't actually private. I've had people view and like my clips when they weren't even invited to watch them, so I abandoned Medal pretty fast. That is fucking creepy.
Medal is also really, really over monetized. The app for the past few years have had obnoxious ads, and the solution is to buy an ad-free subscription, of course! Want your clips to not be uploaded to your computer and kept there? Buy our subscription? Permanently temp clip links instead of expiring ones, yup, subscription. I get that hosting the clips are free, but making the most accessible clipping software and then making it some crappy social media is just a bad take... I hate it.
It also suffers the lack of file size hard limit per clip as limited above, but medal comes with an even better drawback: You have to work with decimals to have less than a gigabyte of clips saved at a time! And better yet, you can ONLY set a 1GB hard cap at minimum, and any of the decimals you sent in that clearly different part of the UI is only a soft limit and makes a circle go red instead! Yay for confusing and convoluted graphic design!
Outplayed... Ugh.
You will be relying on others using this, as I don't like what Outplayed is built on, so please don't take this segment too personally. I just don't want to touch Overwolf, but otherwise I'd totally try it 🙏
I don't really have any incentives to use Outplayed, mainly because I still won't get over my hate boner for Overwolf installing unwanted performance overlays on my friend's computer, as well as the fact it took over Curseforge and it's own version of R5(?) Mod Manager, being overbaked into a super bloated "ecosystem" app launcher. I hate Overwolf with a passion and it's the only reason I roll my eyes when people talk about Curseforge.
And until Outplayed is decoupled from the hot dogshit that is Overwolf, it will have to be a blank. It kind of looked more editing focused than casual clipping anyway...
Replays was almost really good
Replays is pretty garbage too. But let's talk about it anyway, because it almost could have been an amazing competitor to OBS's implementation.
RePlays is an open-source recreation and alternative to the now dead plays.gg, what used to be another clipping software before Medal was any popular.
First time impressions
Let's start with the positives: they absolutely nailed control freak here in terms of settings. You can delete clips after an X amount of days (a fine alternative to just MB storage like my Medal workaround; it works the same way and also punishes me for not sharing clips faster :P), upload to custom servers instead of just RePlays' server, upload to streamable, exclude and add custom games manually with custom names, and...
Oh right, that's where the positives end.
The first time I tried to test this, it loaded infinitely after installing and REFUSED to open at all. It is a miracle it opened when making this blog, in general. Not to mentions this was on both the nightly (at the time), and the stable. The stable, as in, 1.3.0, which is over 2 years old now! Really!!!
The nightly branch is like, 1.3.3x something, which is insane that you did not just choose to name it 1.4 or something. Anyway, the nightly branch does include the option to limit the clip size and set a custom length, which is always appreciated. It is also being updated daily (latest commit being this year, only a month ago or so!), despite the initial download saying March 2024.
Also, the menu in both builds are actual ASS to navigate.
A 2026 revisit
Though, a lot of these complaints come from 2024. How much better does it fare this year? Uhh, definitely not very good.
Despite my graphics card supporting AV1, selecting it caused a generic .NET error to appear. Always a great sign of quality. There are also some bugs (that were quite expected for a nightly release), such as selecting a new encoder making the volume sliders for devices appearing despite turning them off (set to "game only"), and the key bind descriptions being mostly unhelpful and confusing in wording.
The fact it was unclear what games were supported were also pretty disappointing. As a result, I tried to stick to manually adding games.
When it came to practical testing, it was REALLY annoying to use and did absolutely nothing. The software auto-recorded any game that was opened that it was detecting, when all I wanted to do was clip. When I pressed "create bookmark", instead of making a clip in the folder I asked it to it instead started recording again, and pressing it twice also did not print a clip to the folder I asked.
Horrible software. No wonder I didn't use it back in the day. You can't even make per-application audio like OBS, even Medal lets you do this now.
Honorable mention to ShadowPlay
ShadowPlay is Nvidia's own in-baked clip recording software for Windows.
I am absolutely not using ShadowPlay because I genuinely hate it. I already have it out for NVidia for making the legacy Control Panel slow as hell and based on UWP, and I'm not the biggest fan of them trying to replace it with the UI navigation nightmare that is Nvidia App (formerly GeForce Experience). I guess Nvidia also did me a favor by sparing me the ability to use ShadowPlay, because I can't find it in any of their awful, maze menus.
So I will only comment from memory, which will be flawed and pretty uninformed.
ShadowPlay suffered many problems that made it neat at best, but not practical for anything aside of "for fun". It would randomly fail to stretch games to correct aspect ratio (mainly F.E.A.R. 2), it didn't detect all games I played with no way to manually add games, it was super uncustomizable and only captured Game Audio, etc.
I'm glad for the people who can stomach it. I actually really don't like it. But it was a stepping stone into the game clipping scene, so I do have to give it some credit... Despite all of it's problems 5 years ago.
What alternatives do we have outside of the giants?
So, we looked into some of the big names, and we have yet to look at the small brothers. Though before we can continue into FreeMediaHeckYeah's acclaimed clippers, we need to also address the elephant in the room.
Why not just hit "record"?
Anybody who doesn't like overcomplicating recording is probably rolling their eyes, just saying "just hit 'start recording' and capture it", as if it's as easy as a button click.
Okay, yeah, maybe it's easy to showcase a game function. Or to clip a tutorial. But when it comes to moments where you see coming, if you can't clip the past, that moment is gone, forever. This is one of the main appeal of clip software, basically being able to let you record what just happened, rather than rushing to hit 'record' as if it'll capture it magically.
There is also the audience that might be thinking 'just record your whole play session!' under the logics that you are going to use all that performance anyway, so might as well make the most of it... And for somebody with a lot of storage or a lot of free time to not stress it, I could see the appeal of it. But for somebody like me who is incredibly storage paranoid especially finding out that the safest way to handle an SSD is to have "about 15 to 20% free space at all times" to leave the thing space to replace bad blocks with fresh ones... No thank you, it's a waste of storage and editing it is a waste of write cycles. That's what the RAM is for, and I don't have a whole lot of it.
Okay, let's look at the alternatives now.
Segra didn't work in my use case, but might be perfect for yours
Segra is an OBS-based clipping frontend. While it doesn't directly hook into your existing OBS install, it uses all the familiar tools.
Segra does not have size limiting like RePlays, though gets bonus points for allowing decimal size limits for video storage. I will give them credit for already having a lot of supported games, although I did test the custom games on a ROBLOX revival to be sure (using 2011 as a reference), and it did not work, at all. I assume it's because it needs a GAME capture, or more likely just did not like Bongo Cat being in the foreground.
I did close Bongo Cat to be sure. It still did not work. If anybody wants to do my dirty work for me, try testing NZ: Portable as it's not listen Segra's game list and does not require administrator unlike the revival I tested.
Pretty disappointing, though looked pretty good and any alternative in the scene is better than none. Next software.
Ascent (to dogware status)
I was expecting some high tier garbage from Ascent considering its website made pretty bold claims like "No performance impact" (any literal nerd knows there is always a performance impact with recording), and it kind of just read like a Minecraft Client ad. But I decided to give in anyway.
It was really garbage. The subscription push again was incredibly disappointing, and they include AI garbage in your subscription it seems. You also oddly need their subscription to download their videos? Or something?
Yeah, this one was pretty bad. The customization sucked, there was only two codecs to choose from (basically "CPU" and "NVENC H.264". which is garbage and the worst gpu codec everybody and their mother uses), encoder presets could have used descriptions, the UI looked too generic, they mainly intended this for LOL and CS players, limit the custom processes (for some reason?), imply they record your system audio, have a minimum of 1GB storage limit, there were duplicate settings for some fucking reason??
There was so much to configure too and it was overwhelming. It looked like it only supported a couple handful of games by default anyway, which was oddly elitist and locked out 90% of the gaming space and it's purpose? Are you competing with Medal, or Pete's Valorant Recorder?
Steelseries GG / Steelseries Moments
This is the one I was the least excited to try. I had some seemingly vanished SteelSeries mouse in 2024 that had horrible tracking, like it was laughably horrible. So I figured if their budget mice couldn't properly move, their software was probably also garbage.
I didn't even get to trying this, it was so bad. The setup disabled then re-enabled all of my audio devices for some reason. Then when it tried to open, SignalRGB (the software I use to manage my polling rate because nobody can do THAT right either; more on that another time) killed it because it caused conflicts, so in practice, the software could not even be opened.
I trust SignalRGB far more than I do SteelSeries, so in the trash that went. God, please never buy SteelSeries.
Conclusion
So, there are a lot of pretty garbage clipping softwares.
I stuck with OBS, though you should still use what you're comfortable with! I disliked nearly all of these choices, though there are fair reasons why Medal are popular, and I'm actually quite amazed
Unfortunately, I just have specific needs. So, I didn't like them. And that's okay, they were just not for me, though I've met many people quite satisfied with what they have, and I'm grateful for them!
What's not okay, however, is nobody having implemented proper Replay support for OBS yet. Or hard file size limits on individual clips. That should be a crime!