Video Capture updates

WM Capture 10 recording hints 10003

Using the VB - Audio Virtual Cable

Download WM Capture 10
version 10.5.2.1 (new)

WM Capture 10 offers a series of advanced features that enable audio and video routing such that one video can be recorded without being visible with muted or no perceived sound while another is played with fully enabled audio and video. These features allow recording hidden windows (Background mode), setting up the Google Canary browser and setting up Windows audio system.

Below is a Windows 11 example showing the Volume mixer where the Chrome browser is set to output its audio to the System Default while the Canary browser outputs its audio to the VB-Cable port. The set up instructions shown here are the same for Windows 10.

Set up the VB-Audio Virtual Cable as second audio driver (playback and record)

Download VB-Cable from https://download.vb-audio.com/Download_CABLE/VBCABLE_Driver_Pack45.zip. Unzip the downloaded file, follow installation instructions. After rebooting VB-Cable is installed and ready. Right click the speaker icon on your taskbar then click Open volume mixer.

In the Volume mixer, under System, click the Output device arrow as shown below. Windows installed audio drivers including the VB-Cable are shown. Select your Windows default playback device (usually called Speaker).

Now you begin opening the apps you’ll be using for playback and record. You should see these apps populating the Volume mixer. You will need WM Capture and two different browsers (in this example Google Chrome and Google Chrome Canary, both called Google Chrome). Follow the steps below the image.

1. Open the Chrome browser and play a video with sound (this tells Windows, Chrome uses audio). Stop playing video

2. Open WM Capture in Background mode, click the Volume bar (optional) (tell Windows WM Capture uses audio)

3. From WM Capture Options, open Canary browser and play a video with sound. Stop playing video

4. On the Volume mixer, click the Canary arrow and select Cable input, click WM Capture arrow and select Cable input

5. In the Canary browser, open the video you want to record

6. In WM Capture, Mark video, click Record, click Hide (optional). Video image is captured from the Canary browser hidden, audio is captured from the VB-Cable output

7. While video is recording play anything you want in the Chrome browser

(optional) Use Picture in Picture to PIP the recording video image

Set up using a USB or Bluetooth as second audio driver

Same as above, instead of VB-Cable use a USB or a Bluetooth audio playback device driver.

Set up using headphones as second audio driver

Same as above, instead of VB-Cable use the headphones playback device driver.

Notes:
This approach can only be used with Windows 10 and 11.
While it may look a little convoluted it has the advantage that you don’t need to download and install other applications or browser extensions. Below are a few more hints:

1. Any web browser can be used as the playback and recording browser. The only requirement is that the recording browser must have disabled the graphics acceleration (which is necessary anyway to record streaming movies)

2. Background recording mode must be used in WM Capture otherwise the recording window cannot be hidden

3. While recording one video at the same time playing another video your CPU may be overloaded especially for large video windows. (Windows 11 does better than Windows 10 on this). Watch your total CPU loading shown in WM Capture.