If you've made youtube videos of your games, what software have you used/do you like best/do you avoid at all costs?  I'm interested specifically for video capture.  Free or paid versions.

I use "ScreenToGif" (free) for GIFs to post to twitter, which I like using for that purpose.  I have sony vegas for editing, which works decently for my editing needs. I think I paid $99 for that probably about 10 years ago now.  Just need a good means of capturing footage.  My last experience with any video capture was probably a version of Fraps, many years ago..

Going to plug my own software here! If you're on linux then I recommend this tool I wrote: https://github.com/leafo/gifine

It lets you easily record a rectangle of a screen, do some basic edits, then convert it into a gif or a mp4 file.

We also have a sticky topic for creating a gif of your game.

I have two picks for Windows:

OBS as an all-around "stream/screen capture/composite" - can convert the resulting clip to GIF after with e.g. an ffmpeg script.

ShareX for screenshots. It's a little more convenient than the "windows clipboard" route most of the time

If I need to do a screenshot, I usually Alt+PrintScreen to capture the window, and pop open Paint to crop it if I have to. Many websites and applications (eg Imgur and Discord) support pasting raw image data from the clipboard as well, which is handy.

For more serious stuff, I use OBS to capture my game window or specific applications, and if needed, use XMedia Recode to fuff with the file formats, but most sites are pretty good about sharing .webm files now.

I have an older CPU but a GTX 1070. So for the sake of framerate, I find ShadowPlay to be the best software for capturing video. For screenshots I will either Print Screen the right moment, or pull them out of the captured video, and save as a JPG or PNG.

If you paid money for GIF software, that's probably because of the licensing on the file format. It did lapse sometime in the 2000's, though, so now it's a free and open file format.

To answer your question? Open Broadcast Software (OBS). Period. It's fantastic. It's lightweight, open source, and optimized for streaming. Except all you have to do is output the file format to .mp4 and it can capture video locally. Then I just run it through XMedia Recode to convert it to an optimized webm (which is getting video support across more and more websites these days), and you can have high quality, pixel-perfect video capture running over 2 minutes in length under 30 mb if you set up the settings right. It's great if you know what you're doing.

OBS + Ezgif, easy video to gif conversion + optimization. Saved me years off my life probably.

 ShareX for less precise gifs and screencaps.