Anything better than Fraps?

[Eldrad]

I use Fraps to record WoW as movies. It does the job okay, but one thing that has always bothered me is the HUGE size of the files it creates.
I mean they are gigs for a few minutes of footage. It's insane.

Being it's 2010 and we can make invisibility cloaks and squeezable jelly now, I was thinking "is there something that is better than Fraps out there that I don't know about?" Something that saves the recorded footage in smaller file sizes?

[llDemonll]

fraps saves uncompressed footage, that's why it is so big. you can lower the fps recorded, lower the quality (half size instead of full size) turn audio off, etc. if you get something that records small file sizes (gamecam?) you will notice why when you playback the file

[vladdraculea]

http://www.playclaw.com/

i have not used it yet but have heard some positive feedback from folks that have. namely, less performance hit. space i would imagine is going to be roughly similar as to compress captured video on the fly would cause a massive performance hit to anyone who doesn't have a render farm in their pocket.

[vesseblah]

I use Fraps to record WoW as movies. It does the job okay, but one thing that has always bothered me is the HUGE size of the files it creates.
I mean they are gigs for a few minutes of footage. It's insane.

Being it's 2010 and we can make invisibility cloaks and squeezable jelly now, I was thinking "is there something that is better than Fraps out there that I don't know about?" Something that saves the recorded footage in smaller file sizes?

Hard drive space costs peanuts, but once the video has been compressed with lossy codec and quality is lost, it's lost permanently making editing so much harder. Raw uncompressed video just takes a lot of space. Fraps already shrinks it down to 1:5 of the original size. Any better lossless compression would be too slow for realtime capture.

The idea is that you capture with fraps on perfect quality, and when you edit it, you can use any shitty compression you like to shrink the finalized videos for 240p youtube.



PlayClaw is very fishy product based on their forums, but I haven't actually tested it. If you browse the forums, there are people complaining about bugs that were promised to be fixed 5 monts earlier, and the description of general forums is "flaming allowed". It just reeks of unprofessionalism. Who knows, it might even work, but I'm not gonna bother test it myself until reputable sources say it's better than Fraps.

[Eldrad]

Thanks for all the information.

I was generally aware of the reason why the files are so large, but I hoped maybe there was new technology out there that let the saved files be smaller.
Looks like Fraps is still my best option at this point.