How to Screen Record with OBS - The Simplest Guide

Almost every OBS tutorial makes the same mistake. It tries to teach you OBS.

That is a reasonable goal if you are building a streaming rig. It is the wrong goal if you opened the app forty seconds ago because you need to record your screen and send it to someone. OBS exposes something on the order of two hundred settings across eight tabs, and for a plain screen recording, four of them matter. The rest are for live production, and leaving them untouched is not a compromise — the defaults are genuinely fine.

So this page is a subtraction guide. It covers the shortest path from a fresh install to a working recording, tells you explicitly which settings to leave alone, and stops. If you want to understand what the panels do, other pages here do that job better and are linked below.

Which OBS Guide Do You Actually Need?

Cubix has several OBS guides and they are not interchangeable. Pick the one matching what you are trying to do, so you are not reading a reference manual when you wanted a recipe:

Everything below assumes OBS is installed and you have never configured it.

The Four Settings That Matter

Before the steps, here is the whole thing in one table. If you already know your way around OBS, you can stop reading after this:

That is it. Bitrate, keyframe interval, rate control, colour space, downscale filter, buffer size — all of it can stay exactly as it shipped.

The Shortest Path to a Recording

1. Run the Auto-Configuration Wizard (or skip it)

On first launch OBS offers the wizard. Choose "Optimize just for recording, I will not be streaming." It benchmarks your machine and writes sensible resolution, frame rate and encoder values so you do not have to think about any of them.

If you already dismissed the wizard, it is under Tools → Auto-Configuration Wizard. Running it again is safe.

2. Add one capture source

The Sources panel is the bottom-left box. Click +.

• Display Capture — your entire monitor. Pick this unless you have a reason not to.
• Window Capture — a single application, with everything else hidden even if a window is dragged over the top.

Name it anything, click OK, choose your monitor or window, click OK again. Your screen should now appear in the preview.

Choosing between those two properly, and fixing the ways Window Capture breaks, is its own topic — see how to record a specific window in OBS. For a first recording, Display Capture is the safe answer.

3. Pick your microphone by name

Go to Settings → Audio. Under Global Audio Devices, set Mic/Auxiliary Audio to your microphone by name rather than leaving it on Default.

This is the step people skip and regret. "Default" follows whatever Windows or macOS considers the default input, which changes when you plug in headphones, join a call, or connect a monitor with a built-in mic. Naming the device explicitly means the recording you make next month uses the same mic as the one you make today.

Leave Desktop Audio on Default so OBS captures what your computer is playing. On a Mac this behaves differently and often needs an extra step — that is covered in how to record system audio in OBS on Mac.

4. Set the format to Hybrid MP4

Settings → Output → Recording → Recording Format → Hybrid MP4.

This is the highest-value thirty seconds in the whole process. A standard MP4 writes its index at the end of the file, so if OBS crashes, the machine loses power, or Windows forces a restart mid-recording, you get an unplayable file and nothing to recover. Hybrid MP4 (and MKV) stay readable up to the exact moment the recording stopped.

The old advice was "record to MKV and remux afterwards." Hybrid MP4 gives you the same crash safety with a file that most editors and upload forms accept directly, so the remux step goes away. If you have inherited MKV files, how to convert OBS MKV to MP4 covers the lossless route.

While you are on that screen, set Recording Path to a folder you will actually look in.

5. Record

Click Start Recording in the Controls panel, bottom right. Do the thing. Click Stop Recording.

File → Show Recordings opens the folder. If you never set a path and cannot find the file, where OBS recordings go has the default locations per platform.

What to Leave Alone

This is the part other guides omit, and it is where beginners break working setups. Unless you have a specific measured problem, do not touch:

• Rate Control, Bitrate and CQP/CRF. The wizard picked values that suit your hardware. Raising the bitrate does not sharpen a recording that is blurry for some other reason.
• Encoder. If the wizard selected a hardware encoder (NVENC, AMF, QuickSync, VideoToolbox), keep it. Switching to x264 by hand is how most people arrive at encoding overloaded errors.
• Base and Output Resolution. Leave both at your display's native resolution. Mismatching them is the single most common cause of a recording that looks softer than the preview.
• Downscale Filter, Colour Format, Colour Space, Colour Range. Advanced-tab settings that exist for broadcast pipelines. Wrong values here produce washed-out or oddly dark video for reasons that are very hard to diagnose later.
• Filters on sources. Useful, but not on day one.

If your recording genuinely does look wrong, diagnose it rather than guessing: OBS video quality bad — best settings to fix works through the actual causes in order.

One Check Before Anything That Matters

Record for fifteen seconds. Speak. Stop. Open the file.

Confirm three things: the video shows your screen and not a black rectangle, your voice is on it, and the desktop audio is on it. Ninety percent of ruined recordings are a black Display Capture or a silent mic — both invisible while recording and both obvious in a fifteen-second test.

If that test fails, the fix depends on which part failed:

Where This Approach Runs Out

The minimum path gives you an accurate recording of your screen. That is exactly what OBS is for, and for a bug report, a hand-off, or a gameplay clip it is the whole job.

It stops being enough when someone else has to watch and follow the result. A full-resolution capture of a 27-inch display is unreadable on a phone, the frame never moves to show where you clicked, and the raw cursor path reads as unrehearsed. Fixing that in OBS is not a settings change — it means recording the file and then keyframing zooms in a video editor, which is comfortably half an hour of work for a five-minute walkthrough.

Cubix Capture exists for the case where you did not want to configure anything at all. There is no wizard, no format decision and no encoder choice: it records on Windows and macOS, and applies zoom that follows your clicks, cursor smoothing and background framing while capturing, so the file that lands is already watchable. The free Starter plan is enough to compare the output against an OBS recording of the same screen.

If you are configuring a stream, building scene layouts, or capturing high-motion gameplay, stay with OBS — nothing else in this category does those jobs as well.

Keep Reading

• How to Use OBS for the First Time — what every panel actually does.
• How to Set Up OBS for Screen Recording — the properly configured version of this page.
• How to Record Your Screen with OBS on Windows — the Windows-specific traps.
• How to Record Your Screen with OBS on Mac — permissions, system audio and Retina scaling.
• OBS Best Settings for Screen Recording — when you are ready to tune rather than accept defaults.