How to Record a Specific Window in OBS (Not Full Screen)

There are two different questions hiding behind "I only want to record part of my screen," and OBS answers them with completely different tools.

If you want one application — the browser, the deck, the code editor — regardless of where it sits or how big it is, you want a source-based approach, and that is what this page covers. If you want a fixed rectangle of your display — the top-left quarter, a 1280×720 box, a vertical strip for a Shorts video — you want a geometry-based approach, which is cropping, and how to record only part of your screen in OBS covers that instead.

Getting the two mixed up is the reason a lot of setups half-work. A crop cannot follow a window that moves. A Window Capture cannot exclude the top half of the window it is capturing.

If you just want the quick five-click version of window capture, how to record only one window in OBS is the short setup guide. This page is about picking the right isolation method and fixing the specific ways it fails.

Three Ways to Isolate One Application

The third option feels like a step backwards and is frequently the right answer. It is the only one that captures everything visually associated with the app — menus, tooltips, drag previews — because as far as the OS is concerned it is just recording the screen.

Setting Up Window Capture Properly

1. Open the app first. OBS cannot enumerate a window that does not exist, and on Windows it cannot capture one that is fully minimised.
2. Sources → + → Window Capture (on macOS: macOS Screen Capture, then set Method to Window Capture or Application Capture).
3. Pick the target from the Window dropdown. Entries are shown as title:class:executable, which matters for the next section.
4. Set Capture Method — see below.
5. Decide on Client Area. Ticked, you get only the window's contents. Unticked, you also get the title bar, and on Windows the drop shadow and rounded corners, which usually looks better over a background than a hard-cropped edge.
6. Right-click the source → Transform → Fit to screen (Ctrl+F / Cmd+F) so it fills the canvas.

Capture Method, Briefly

On Windows the Capture Method dropdown is what fixes a black window: Windows 10 (1903 and up) uses the modern Windows Graphics Capture API and handles hardware-accelerated apps like browsers, Discord and Electron editors; BitBlt is the legacy path that returns black for most of them. The full explanation, along with the hybrid-graphics case that produces the same symptom, is in recording your screen with OBS on Windows.

On macOS there is no equivalent choice — ScreenCaptureKit handles it — but the Screen Recording permission must be granted and OBS relaunched, or every window is black. That is covered in recording your screen with OBS on Mac.

Why Your Dropdown Menus Disappear

This is the defining limitation of window capture and the thing most guides never mention.

When you click a menu in an application, the operating system usually does not draw that menu inside the application's window. It creates a separate top-level window — a popup, layered above everything, that belongs to the app but is not part of it. Context menus, combo box dropdowns, tooltips, autocomplete suggestions and date pickers all behave this way.

Window Capture captures one window. The popup is a different window. So your viewers watch you click File, nothing happens, and then the file opens.

There is no setting that fixes this. There are three workarounds:

• On macOS, use Application Capture. It captures every window belonging to the app, so popups come with it. This is the cleanest solution and it only exists on the Mac.
• On Windows, use Display Capture and crop to the window. You lose the ability to have other windows on top, and you gain every menu. For a recorded demo where you control the desktop anyway, this is usually the right trade.
• Avoid menus in the demo. Use keyboard shortcuts, or design the walkthrough around in-window UI. Worth doing anyway — menu-heavy demos are hard to follow regardless of capture method.

Why the Capture Breaks Mid-Session

Window Capture identifies its target by matching against that title:class:executable string, and the Window Match Priority setting decides what happens when the exact match disappears:

• Match title, otherwise find window of same type — good for apps with a stable title.
• Match title, otherwise find window of same executable — the most forgiving, and the right default for browsers.
• Match title only — brittle. The capture goes blank the moment the title changes.

Browsers are the classic failure. Chrome's window title is the active tab's title, so a capture bound to "Dashboard - Acme - Google Chrome" stops matching the instant you switch tabs. If your browser recording goes black halfway through a demo, this is almost always why. Set the priority to same executable and it survives.

The same applies to editors that put the filename in the title bar, and to any app with a document name in its window title.

Sizing, Black Bars and Resizing Mid-Recording

A window smaller than your canvas leaves empty space around it. Two ways to handle that:

• Transform → Fit to screen scales the window up to fill the canvas. Free, and it softens text if the window is much smaller than the canvas — you are upscaling.
• Right-click → Resize output (source size) shrinks the canvas to the window's exact dimensions instead. Sharper, because nothing is scaled, but it changes your output resolution, which may not be what you want for a video that has to be 1920×1080.

The bigger trap: the source is locked to the dimensions it had when you added it. Resize the application while recording and OBS keeps the original transform, so the video stretches, or the window no longer fills the frame. Set the window to the size you want before adding the source, and do not touch it once recording starts.

If the window is not 16:9, you will have bars whatever you do. Filling that space with something other than black — a colour source or an image behind the window — takes thirty seconds and makes the result look composed rather than broken.

Windows OBS Cannot Capture At All

Some windows will be black no matter what you do:

• Elevated applications. Task Manager, Registry Editor, installers and UAC prompts run at a higher integrity level than OBS. Run OBS as administrator to capture them.
• Protected content. Netflix, Prime Video and other DRM-protected playback will render black by design.
• Minimised windows cannot be captured by Windows Graphics Capture. Keep the target visible, even if it is behind OBS.
• Full-screen apps on a separate macOS Space may stop updating in Window Capture. Application Capture handles it better.

A Thirty-Second Check Before the Real Take

Record fifteen seconds, and during it: open a dropdown menu, hover something that shows a tooltip, and switch to a different app and back. Then watch it.

That single test catches the three failures that otherwise only surface after you have recorded the whole walkthrough — missing popups, a capture that unbound itself, and a window that went black when it lost focus.

When App-Level Recording Should Not Be This Hard

Everything above is the cost of a source model designed for live broadcast, where a scene is assembled from fixed rectangles ahead of time and nothing moves during the show. That model is excellent for streaming and awkward for a software demo, where the whole point is that you are moving around an interface.

Cubix Capture takes the other approach: you pick an application, and it keeps that application framed on a styled canvas while you use it. Resizing or moving the window during a recording adjusts the padding rather than stretching the video, menus and dialogs stay in frame because it is not binding to a single window handle, and the empty space around a non-16:9 app is filled with a background instead of black. It applies zoom that follows your clicks while capturing, so a window recorded on a 4K display is still readable on a phone. It runs on Windows and macOS, and the free Starter plan is enough to test it against an OBS Window Capture of the same app.

If you are building a stream layout where the window position is fixed and known in advance, OBS Window Capture is the correct tool and the constraints above stop being constraints.

Keep Reading

• How to Record Only Part of Your Screen in OBS — the cropping approach, for a fixed region rather than an app.
• How to Record Only One Window in OBS — the short setup version of this page.
• OBS Black Screen: Every Cause and Solution — when the window is black and none of the above explains it.
• How to Screen Record a Specific Window on Mac — doing the same thing without OBS.
• How to Record Your Screen with OBS on Windows — capture methods and hybrid graphics in full.