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Bandicam is a shareware screen and game recorder for Windows, capturing DirectX, OpenGL and Vulkan gameplay, the desktop or a webcam, free with a ten-minute cap per clip, and now with an AI-powered 2027 beta alongside it.
Bandicam is shareware, and the free download is a real product rather than a countdown to a nag screen.
There is no time limit on how long you can keep using it, only limits on what it produces.
There are also two Bandicams on offer here now, and the difference between them is worth two minutes of your time.
Two Bandicams, and They Are Not the Same
The download list carries the stable 8.3.1 build and a public beta of Bandicam 2027. They are not the same application with a different number on it.
8.3.1 is the tested one. It is what the rest of this page describes, it is what the reviews below are about, and it is what you want if the recording matters.
Bandicam 2027 is where the company has put its AI work, and it is a beta. Take it if you want to see what is coming, not if you are recording something you cannot repeat.
What the Free Version Gives You on the Stable Build
On 8.3.1, all three recording modes work in full, with no feature gates and no expiry. Two restrictions apply until you register, and one feature is held back entirely.
| What you get | Free version | Registered |
|---|---|---|
| Recording length | 10 minutes per recording | Unlimited, over 24 hours in one go |
| Watermark | www.BANDICAM.com across the top of every video | None |
| Scheduled recording | Not available | Available |
| Game, Screen and Device modes | All three, unrestricted | All three, unrestricted |
| Image capture and FPS overlay | Included | Included |
That makes the free stable build genuinely useful for short clips, troubleshooting captures, bug reports and tutorial segments. If you need thirty-minute lecture captures or clean YouTube uploads, you are buying a licence or picking a different tool.
Commercial use needs a separate licence. Bandicam allows free installation to test at home, at the office or at school, but any work or commercial use requires the Business licence, which is not the same purchase as removing the watermark. If your recordings are monetised or made for an employer, check that before you record a client demo.
What Bandicam 2027 Beta Adds
The 2027 branch is Bandicam's AI release, and the feature gap against 8.3.1 is not small. Bandicam publishes the comparison itself.
| Feature | 2027 Beta | 8.3.1 stable |
|---|---|---|
| Watermark | None, according to Bandicam | On every unregistered recording |
| AI transcription | Turns recorded speech into text for subtitles or minutes | Not available |
| AI webcam background | Blur, remove or replace it in one click | Chroma key only, so you need a green screen |
| Built-in editing | Trim the ends and export without leaving the app | Not available |
| Smart Zoom | Zooms automatically on your mouse clicks | Not available |
| Multi-area blur | Up to three regions hidden at once | One region |
| Webcam overlay shapes | Twenty shapes | Basic shapes |
The transcription and Smart Zoom features are the ones that matter for tutorial work, because they remove the two jobs people usually do afterwards in an editor.
Read the word beta before you rely on this. The no-watermark behaviour is what Bandicam advertises for the 2027 beta, and beta terms are not promises about the released product. Betas also crash in ways stable builds do not, so install it alongside 8.3.1 rather than instead of it.
Bandicam vs the Free Alternatives
If the watermark or the ten-minute cap is a dealbreaker on the stable build, several fully free options are worth comparing before you commit.
OBS Studio is the heavyweight: free, open source, no watermark, no time limit, and the default choice for streaming to Twitch or YouTube. The trade is complexity, because scene composition, audio routing and encoder tuning all have a real learning curve.
ShareX is the closest free equivalent for desktop and application capture, with recording powered by a bundled FFmpeg engine and an image editor good enough to make you question paying for one. It is less polished than Bandicam for fullscreen game capture.
Screenpresso pairs a proper annotation editor with GPU-accelerated 4K recording and has a free edition with an optional Pro upgrade. ScreenToGif is the one to grab if the output needs to be an animated GIF rather than a video.
Cap Screen Recorder is the Loom-style option for recording and sharing short tutorials with teammates, open source and self-hostable if you want the files staying in-house.
Simple Screen Recorder and Kalmuri cover the minimalist end, for a quick clip with no configuration at all.
On the paid side, Snagit and FastStone Capture are stronger than Bandicam at annotated screenshots and scrolling capture, and weaker at games.
Bandicam's case against all of them is twofold: a Game Recording mode that hooks the graphics API directly rather than capturing the screen surface, and an interface a non-technical person can learn in five minutes. The full field is in the Screen Capture category.
Game Recording Mode
This is the flagship feature and the reason most gamers install it. Hooking the graphics API instead of the screen surface means lower CPU overhead and steadier framerates while you record.
It works with Minecraft, Roblox, PUBG, League of Legends, Overwatch and World of Warcraft, and with anything built on DirectX 9 through 12, OpenGL or Vulkan.
While the hook is active, Bandicam puts a live FPS counter in the corner of the screen: green when it is armed, red while it is recording.
Hardware encoding through NVIDIA NVENC, Intel Quick Sync Video and AMD VCN keeps the overhead low. Recent builds across both release branches improved Vulkan hooking stability and fixed DX12 captures that failed to stop cleanly.
Screen Recording Mode
For everything that is not a game, Screen Recording captures a region, a window or the full desktop. Use it for Zoom Workplace calls, PowerPoint walkthroughs, browser sessions, software demos or online lectures.
Recent builds added web element auto-detection, so choosing "Select a recording area" can snap to a YouTube video frame instead of leaving you pixel-hunting with the cursor.
Real-time drawing lets you annotate mid-recording with arrows, boxes, highlights and freehand lines. Mouse click effects and cursor highlighting toggle per recording, which earns its keep in software tutorials where viewers need to see exactly where you clicked.
Scheduled recording handles unattended captures, for a long process you want monitored or a webinar you cannot attend live. It is a registered-only feature.
Device Recording Mode
The third mode captures external sources: webcams, capture cards, IP cameras, phones and HDMI inputs such as consoles.
Picture-in-picture merges your webcam onto game footage live, with rounded-rectangle and rounded-square overlay shapes added in recent builds.
Chroma key removes a green background from the webcam feed during capture rather than in post, which saves an editing pass you would otherwise have to make on every clip.
What's New
Version 8.3.1.2537 arrived on 26 June 2026 and is a small maintenance release. There are three changes.
- Fixed certain command-line option combinations that were not working
- Fixed a potential crash during Bandicam and Bandicut updates
- Other minor bug fixes
The larger changes readers usually ask about landed earlier and across both release branches, so they are already in this build. Those are the Vulkan hooking stability work, the webcam overlay alpha-channel fix in Vulkan games, per-process exclusive audio capture, the rounded webcam overlay shapes, web element auto-detection and a blur control on the fullscreen recording bar.
On the encoding side, AV1 through NVENC settled down after a rough start in 8.0.0, and Bandicam moved to NVIDIA's Video Codec SDK 12, dropping the legacy SDK 8. If you are on an older Bandicam and your AV1 recordings were unusable, that is the fix you were waiting for.
Everything in the 2027 beta is new by comparison, and it is listed in the table further up rather than as a changelog, because it is a different branch rather than the next point release.
Technical Specifications
Bandicam encodes to H.264, HEVC, MPEG-1, Xvid and AV1, writing MP4 or AVI with PCM or MP3 audio. Hardware acceleration covers NVIDIA NVENC and CUDA, Intel Quick Sync Video, and AMD VCN and VCE.
If you record to AVI using the MPEG-1 or MJPEG codec, those files will only open on machines that have Bandicam installed. The free Bandicam MPEG-1 Decoder is a 1.4 MB package that fixes that on an editing PC without installing Bandicam there too.
It runs on 64-bit Windows 11, 10, 8 and 7, needs DirectX 9.0c or later, and takes around 50 MB of disk space before you record anything. Bandicam Company keeps 32-bit builds in its old-versions archive only.
AVI 2.0 support means recording length is bounded by free disk space rather than by the container, and files split automatically at 4 GB on FAT32 volumes. Recording for more than 24 hours in one session is a registered-version capability.
If a finished recording will not upload or import, MediaInfo reports the exact codec, bitrate and container so you can stop guessing.
To shrink or convert what you captured, FFmpeg does it from the command line and HandBrake does the same job with a window and presets.
Who Should Look Elsewhere
The tell is whether you can afford for a recording to go wrong. On the stable build, anything past ten minutes is cut short and stamped unless you pay. On the beta, you are trusting unreleased software with something you may not be able to record twice.
If neither of those suits and you are not going to buy a licence, learning OBS is a better use of an afternoon than working around the limits of something that will not cooperate.
If you need to stream live rather than record to disk, Bandicam is the wrong category of tool. OBS Studio is built for it and costs nothing.
If the recording is only the first step and the real work is cutting, grading or captioning, a recorder will not take you far. DaVinci Resolve has a free tier that covers most of it, and there are more options in the Video Editors category.
And if you are on a Mac, this page is not for you. Bandicam Company ships a separate macOS build, which is a different application with a different feature set.
Quick Setup
Installation takes under two minutes. Launch Bandicam, pick a mode, set your recording area or target, and press F12 to start.
The default settings produce a balanced H.264 MP4 that uploads to YouTube without re-encoding. Switch to HEVC for smaller files, or AV1 if your GPU supports it and you want maximum compression.
Quick questions
Is Bandicam free?
It is free to download and keep, with no expiry, but it is shareware rather than freeware. On the stable build, recordings are capped at ten minutes each and carry a watermark until you buy a licence.
How do I remove the Bandicam watermark?
On the stable build, only by registering: buy a licence, click the lock icon and enter your serial. Bandicam does advertise the 2027 beta as recording without a watermark, but that is beta behaviour rather than a promise about the released product.
Should I install 8.3.1 or the 2027 beta?
8.3.1 for anything that matters, because it is the tested build. The 2027 beta if you want the AI transcription, Smart Zoom and built-in editing, and you can afford for a recording to fail.
Bandicam or OBS Studio?
OBS if you are streaming, recording long sessions, or unwilling to pay. Bandicam if you want fullscreen game capture that works in five minutes without learning a scene compositor.
Can I use the free version for work or YouTube?
Not for commercial or work use. Bandicam requires a separate Business licence for that, which is a different purchase from the one that removes the watermark.
Does Bandicam work on Windows 11?
Yes, and on 64-bit Windows 10, 8 and 7 as well. It needs DirectX 9.0c or later, and 32-bit builds are available only from Bandicam's old-versions archive.
Download Bandicam and see how it handles a ten-minute clip before you decide, or tell us how you got on if you have used it before. Both the stable build and the 2027 beta are on the download page.
There are screenshots here, and the free competition is in the Screen Capture category.
GJ
Excellent Software But I Am Unable To Purchase The Same By Using My Indusind Bank Rupay Credit Card Even When It Is Costly.
AS
IT IS THE BEST SITE I HAVE EVER SEEN, THANK YOU
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