You've probably had a game-of-your-life pentakill pop off in solo queue, only to realize your recorder wasn't running and it's gone forever. Or pulled off a 4-kill comeback in a 5-man teamfight with no way to watch it again. A LoL match runs 25 to 40 minutes, so even "remembering to hit record" is easy to forget every time. In this guide we'll cover, in order, how to record your League of Legends gameplay directly with OBS, how to collect only the highlights automatically with DOR, and how to permanently save past-game replays as video.
Method 1: Manual recording with OBS
OBS Studio is completely free, which makes it the most popular choice for recording LoL. If you just installed it, set it up in this order. (1) Click the + in the bottom-left "Scenes" panel to add a scene. (2) In the "Sources" panel next to it, click + then "Display Capture" and select the monitor LoL is on. (Game Capture often shows a black screen on windowed games like LoL, so Display Capture is safer.) (3) Go to Settings, Output, switch Output Mode to "Advanced," and under the Recording tab set the encoder to "NVIDIA NVENC H.264." This is the key part, because leaving it on software (x264) makes your CPU juggle the game and encoding at once, dropping your frames.
Once setup is done, you have to click "Start Recording" in the bottom right right before the game begins, then click "Stop Recording" yourself when it ends. That's where the trouble starts. Recording a full 30-minute match produces a 5 to 10GB file at 1080p / 60fps, and to salvage a 30-second highlight you have to scrub through all that footage to trim it. Play 10 games a day and that's a mountain of footage to cut, plus any game where you forgot to hit record is simply lost. The flexibility is unbeatable, but "quickly keeping just the good moments" takes way too much effort.
Method 2: Automatic recording with DOR
If "setup and editing are both a hassle, I just want the good moments to collect themselves" sounds like you, DOR aims at exactly that. DOR automatically detects when LoL launches and starts recording in the background, then detects in-game events like kills, assists, and objectives (Dragon, Baron, Herald) and trims just the surrounding segments into clips. No need to hit record, and no need to trim footage afterward.
Setup in 3 steps
- 1. Download and run the DOR installer (Windows 10/11, free, no watermark).
- 2. With DOR running, launch the LoL client and DOR pops up "League of Legends detected" and automatically starts recording in the background. No extra action needed.
- 3. When the game ends, your kill, teamfight, and objective moments are already trimmed and waiting in your clip library. Share them as-is, or crop them vertical in DOR's free editor and you're done.
Do pentakills get saved automatically too?
Yes. It detects kill and multi-kill events in real time, so everything from a double kill to a pentakill is saved as a clip with no extra action. Baron steals, 1v3 comeback teamfights, teleport ganks, and more are sorted by event so you can browse "just pentakills" or "just objectives" in your library. And if auto-detection ever misses a moment, a hotkey instantly saves the last 30 seconds as a clip, so you almost never lose anything.
How to record LoL replays
"It's an already-finished game, can I still record it?" You can. Open "Match History" on the right of the LoL client and each recent game has a replay download button. Click it and a .rofl replay file is saved. Stats sites like OP.GG let you download the same .rofl too. Playing a replay lets you rewatch teamfights from a free camera and in slow motion, so you can make far cooler clips than the in-game view allows.
Here's the single most important thing. A .rofl file isn't a "recorded video," it's data the game replays, so it only plays back on the same patch version it was downloaded on. Once a patch rolls over, old .rofl files won't open, throwing "This replay cannot be played." In other words, hoarding .rofl files gives you, at best, one patch cycle of storage on borrowed time. So to keep something forever, the right move is to play the replay with DOR running and record that screen as an mp4 video. Once it's captured as video, it stays no matter how many patches go by, even if you uninstall LoL.
How to record without lag
The biggest reason your frames drop while recording is software encoding. Switch to NVIDIA NVENC (or AMD AMF) hardware encoding, which uses your graphics card's dedicated encoding chip, and CPU load nearly vanishes, usually cutting your in-game frame loss to single digits. DOR uses NVENC by default, so there's nothing to touch. If it's still too much on a laptop or a low-spec GTX 1050-class card, dropping the recording resolution to 720p and the framerate to 30fps cuts the load dramatically. Running the game at 144Hz while recording at just 30fps still gives plenty of clip quality. Finally, setting the game to "Borderless Windowed" also prevents captures from saving as a black screen.
Recommended recording settings
- Resolution: 1920x1080 (1080p), plenty for both Shorts and YouTube
- Framerate: 60fps (30fps on low-spec)
- Encoder: NVIDIA NVENC H.264 / HEVC (software x264 not recommended)
- Bitrate: 20 to 30Mbps (18 to 20 if using CQP)
- Format: mp4 (with OBS, record to mkv then convert to mp4)
- Audio: game sound and mic on separate tracks
In short: OBS manual recording if you want to control everything yourself, DOR automatic recording if you want highlights collected hands-free. You'll find recommended settings and real user clips on the League of Legends recording page, and fellow Riot titles like Valorant and Teamfight Tactics (TFT) record automatically with DOR the exact same way.
