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How to capture Visual Studio Code in OBS Studio

I messed around a bit with OBS Studio lately, and found it wouldn’t manage to see Visual Studio Code if I tried adding it just like a game (Source => Add => Game Capture).

After a quick search, I found a solution explaining that it’s based on Chrome (nothing new here), and that as such OBS can only see it if hardware acceleration is disabled. That came a bit as a surprise to me, as obviously games use hardware acceleration and can be capture, but why not.
They also said Game Capture would still not work (gah!) and that Display Capture should be used instead. Now that’s a real bummer, because display capture means it needs to be cropped in order to show just the part that I want (notably, not the taskbar), and also it means that you have to be careful about everything that might get on your screen… much less convenient than capturing a specific program.
Indeed Game Capture doesn’t work (I tried). Eventually, I tried using Window Capture and… it worked. It still needs to be resized/cropped a bit if you don’t use a window that matches your target video resolution (unless you don’t mind some blank space), but that’s still way more convenient than Display Capture IMO.

Recap:

  1. Start Visual Studio Code with the --disable-gpu argument (I’d recommend editing your shortcut, no hardware acceleration is theoretically slower, but I didn’t really notice any difference)
  2. In OBS, use Window Capture to target your Visual Studio Code window

Posted in software.


2 Responses

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  1. RiversideRocks says

    VSCode is quite nice to record, makes for good videos.

  2. Blubbeh says

    If you’re running a recent Windows 10 build (1903 or newer) and OBS version (25.0 or newer iirc), you should be able to use window capture with hardware accelerated windows as well these days via Windows Graphics Capture.



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