LICEcap Doesn’t Respect High DPI Settings on Windows 8 and 10

high-dpiscreen capturewindows 10windows 8.1

I attempted to make an animated gif screenshot of the image of my answer here using LICEcap, on windows 8.1. This is as a test and I selected the whole gif, and a small border around it.

I have a 4K display and use 125% display scaling to get everything nice and legible. However, what is saved is just a portion of the screen, and its off where it should be by a bit. Its confused. How do I get licecap to work correctly?

Screenshot of LICEcap offset when using a High DPI display

Best Answer

As of version 1.26 there's an official fix and it works fine. If you have a older version, or another program with similar issues, but the simplest thing to do is to upgrade.

Unfortunately, the Windows start screen and LICEcap don't go well together, so no gif for the first part.

You'll need to go to the place LICEcap is installed (type in licecap into the start screen, right click, Open file location.
Right click on the LICEcap shortcut (or executable) and click Properties to bring up the Properties dialog.
Go to the Compatibility tab.
Tick the Disable display scaling on high DPI settings option.

Do that, and screenshots work fine. They're a bit big cause of the display, but that's all em pixels.

Animation showing result

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Windows – Avoid Blurry texts when having 150% of normal DPI (windows 8.1)

Chrome has been lacking support for DirectWrite to render fonts on Windows. The issue you are describing is what happens not only on high DPI settings but also on normal (100%) settings.

There is a long and old thread on the Chromium issues website: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541

The developers said they already enable it on Chrome Canary builds but there is no timetable on when the regular version of Chrome will support it.

You can enable DirectWrite launching the latest Chrome Canary build with the following parameters:

# To enable DirectWrite:
--enable-direct-write --no-sandbox

# To enable DirectWrite and sub-pixel font scaling:
--enable-direct-write --no-sandbox --enable-experimental-web-platform-features

The above parameters were listed by one of the developers in the same thread. The post link is https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541#c61

Be warned the by disabling the sandbox feature you are compromising one of Chrome's security features.

Opera, which uses Webkit, has the same problem as Chrome.

Windows – Text is blurry on normal-DPI external display with Windows 8.1 and high-DPI laptop display

FF and other apps that are DPI-aware are only system-aware. They need to be per-monitor aware to show up correctly on extended monitors. Otherwise they get scaled by windows (poorly, with the resulting blurriness). Currently very few windows apps are per-monitor DPI aware - IE11, Task Manager, Adobe Reader 11. Windows Explorer in Your screenshots is only system aware. I have the same problem with a 3200x1800 (15") laptop screen and an extended FHD monitor. These settings are enforced by windows if the "Let me choose one scaling level for all my displays" is not selected. Resources: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn528847.aspx

Best Answer

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