Most people who start YouTube channels, especially ones that focus heavily on screen recording, use a good computer. A good computer means that you won't have to worry about any issues when recording a game or other task on your computer. However, since I had a Chromebook for most of my YT channel, I had to deal with annoyances that aren't really talked about.
1) Picking the right screen recorder. For some reason, all of the screen recorders on ChromeOS run differently. It doesn't help that there's 50 thousands options, either. There's some on the Chrome Web Store, the built in one, MANY crappy paid online ones, and some hidden PWA gems. The most heinous are certainly the online ones, since they almost always lag the video and cost absurd amounts for very limited usage. It's so easy to find these just by searching "Free Online Screen Recorder". Please don't fall for them.
With all these options, it's difficult to find a screen recorder that works on your device and has what you need. Some don't record audio that well, don't record your microphone, slow down your computer too much, take up far too much storage, or create weird audio formats that aren't seekable. I've encountered all these issues at some point. As evident by many of my videos, I switched screen recorders often in a scramble to find the best one. In the end, it didn't matter, since I got a better computer and have Arch Linux on my Chromebook.
2) The inevitable lag. Even if you do find a screen recorder that works, it's not guaranteed that it won't lag when you record. When you're recording and browsing the web and doing very light-weight activities, you'll probably will be fine. But, the minute you start playing a game (especially web-based ones like Super Mario Construct), good luck. The game will lag, and so will the resulting video footage. It makes sense--doing harder tasks on your computer while trying to record will take up a lot of CPU power on low spec machines.
In my Mac Mini video, I mentioned how I got lag when I recorded a Game Boy Color game. This isn't a lie. If you go back and watch some parts in the middle of my Oracle of Ages series, you will notice parts where there is a very noticeable frame drop. This infuriated me nearly to the point of giving up. I tried nearly everything to fix this, but each time there would eventually be lag. It truly feels like these Chromebooks are moving backwards in the advances of technology.
3) Limited Storage. On top of dealing with crappy recording experiences, I had to figure out how to manage my storage with long videos. They would almost always take up a significant amount of space on my computer, which forced me to quickly upload it in fear of running out of space. Chromebooks (surprise) don't have a lot of disk space, so keeping multiple projects just wasn't an option.
Looking back, I'm not sure why I didn't install Linux on my Chromebook much sooner. It's a game-changer and I'm never going back. It can literally do exactly what a Chromebook can and much more, including record pretty good for free. You're still going to notice the limited hardware, but at least you won't be locked down.
No comments:
Post a Comment