How to make videos of your Android games

One of the biggest problems when trying to capture videos directly on your Android device is that it causes serious bottleneck especially when you try to shoot in real-time. This occurs even more so when using an app specifically designed for rendering video and both the app and the game are running simultaneously. Thankfully, there are tricks for improving the quality of both of them among which apps that run from an Android emulator for PCs and capturing with a desktop tool designed with this in mind like Open Broadcaster Software.

The problem with recording

The use of Android apps usually causes varying results depending on the nature of each app. If you’re looking at a management app with low level graphics and not too many problems, the hard part comes when you try to capture video games that already use up all of your processing capacity. At that point, you can forget about recording any sounds along with it, you’ll need to be a root user.

A good example of what we just mentioned is SCR Pro 2, a completely free app that lets you record videos at their native resolution. Its downside is that it slows down when processing high charge graphics by reducing the fluidity of the captured images. And again, forget about recording sounds unless you have root permissions. Another option is use the emulator that’s already integrated with Android Studio with fairly good results. Remember, though it is necessary to have your PC physically connected and a bit of prior knowledge and experience will help when setting up. In any case, anything that’s under 20 photograms per second is a nightmare for anyone who wants to comfortably watch the game.

Emulators – your key to success

Lately, we’ve talked a lot about Android emulators for PCs especially given the latest advances in this field when it comes to functionality and results. Tools like Nox and Droid4X work like a charm given that they are designed for being used with desktop operating systems. Even more so when they’re used to emulate Android games with much higher fluidity even in comparison to the original device.

Now, the same way that you take screen captures of the whole screen as well as of separate windows through external software, you can do the same with an emulator. One of the most flexible tools in this respect is Open Broadcaster Software thanks to which the possibility to customize a number of apps that are capable of simultaneous screen captures. Which allows you to record one part of your screen while at the same time you use a webcam connected to your PC. Best of all, it’s free and open source. It’s not without good reason that this tool has always been very widely used for streaming video in real-time on Twitch.

When you open the application, you’ll have to select your capture elements, that will be grouped together into “scenes”. When creating a new scene you need to right click on the space just under the lower space when you can put scenes in order. Within the same are you’ll come across a number of fonts to choose from with different nature that we’ll select when right-clicking on the space designated for this purpose. In your case, you’ll need to capture the game window, so go to Add > Window Capture. In the bar that appears in the upper part of your screen, choose the emulator window (we’ve already tried with Nox). From there you can also select other parameters like how to hide your mouse cursor.

In Configuration > Code and Configure > Video you’ll be able to toggle your video quality by choosing outgoing resolution, photograms per second, and the codec itself along with its corresponding bitrate. Depending on the technical specifications of your machine, you’ll have to force it to allow for a a coherent balance between the quality of capturing and the amount of photograms per second.