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Glossary · workflow

What is Screen recording (vs downloading)?

Screen recording captures whatever is shown on your display as a video file. Different from downloading: screen recording works on any visible content but is limited to your display's resolution and is subject to content-protection systems (which may produce black frames for DRM-flagged content).

Also called:screen capture · video recording · screencap

Two ways to save a video that's playing on your screen:

Downloading: requests the actual video file from the source. Original quality, original codec, original frame rate. Works only if the source allows it (most YouTube content does).

Screen recording: re-encodes whatever your display shows. Resolution capped at your screen's; frame rate capped at the recording tool's. May produce black frames for content-protection-flagged content.

For YouTube specifically: downloading is dramatically better. A 4K YouTube video screen-recorded on a 1080p monitor becomes a 1080p re-encoded file. The original 4K is unrecoverable from that recording. Downloading gives you the actual 4K source bytes.

When screen recording makes sense: live content that's not being saved (live streams that aren't archived), DRM-protected content where downloading isn't possible, content from a service without a downloadable URL.

Common questions

Why do screen recordings of YouTube look worse than the source?
Screen recordings re-encode at your display resolution + the recording tool's codec settings. Original quality is lost in the process. Downloading the source file preserves everything.

Related terms

DRM (Digital Rights Management)

DRM is the umbrella term for content-protection systems that restrict copying or redistributing media.

Codec

A codec is the algorithm that encodes (compresses) and decodes raw audio or video into a smaller stream.

Streaming (vs download)

Streaming is the delivery model where the client starts consuming the file before it's fully downloaded.

VidPickr is a free, browser-based YouTube downloader. Every term in this glossary either describes how YouTube delivers video or why your downloads behave the way they do. Try the downloader →