Good fraps program?

[Omarian]

Fraps covers all your needs, has super high res if you want, smooth video quality, all.

[Mythricia]

Be wary of Playclaw.

Yes, it works great. But I've had several raid kills' footage screwed up because it decided to drop frames in the video, without any FPS drop ever happening in the actual game - in the footage I had afterwards though, there were serveral 5+ seconds long hiccups. I was recording to a clean SSD drive, so, that was hardly the problem either.

Fraps never did this to me, although you have to suffer slightly larger amounts of data being written to your harddrive, and more apparent FPS issues in game. Depends though - I've often recorded a full 10min raid without really dropping below 60FPS for more than a second.


Also, file-sizes don't matter. Fraps has no limit - it simply splits files every 3.99Gb or so, and these can be put together in any editor without any impact on visual quality - I prefer Fraps' way of handling it over PlayClaws enourmous file sizes.

Lastly, PlayClaw loves to crash games, due to the way it hooks up with the graphics (I can't explain that very well, pardon the noobness), meaning every time you stop recording, your game usually hangs for quite a while. Sometimes that ends in a crash. Fraps does none of this. It's a known issue on the PlayClaw forums as well.


My opinions.

---------- Post added 2011-01-23 at 05:15 PM ----------

That's only the case if Fraps is on that same drive. Otherwise it'll be choppy due to the fact that all the data is being sent to that other drive immediately.

Untrue, simply recording to another drive does not slow down anything. It's not "moved" to a different HDD in any other fashion that if you were recording to the same drive as Fraps is on. Recording to a different HDD than Fraps, does not, in any imaginable way affect performance, in and of itself.

[Deleted]

I use Xfire, look up a guide on youtube if you like.

Also record onto a second hdd, to reduce lag in the game and on video, when recording.

[Ricje]

Be wary of Playclaw.

Yes, it works great. But I've had several raid kills' footage screwed up because it decided to drop frames in the video, without any FPS drop ever happening in the actual game - in the footage I had afterwards though, there were serveral 5+ seconds long hiccups. I was recording to a clean SSD drive, so, that was hardly the problem either.

I have recorded quite a few videos using Play Claw and never had this problem.

Also, file-sizes don't matter. Fraps has no limit - it simply splits files every 3.99Gb or so, and these can be put together in any editor without any impact on visual quality - I prefer Fraps' way of handling it over PlayClaws enourmous file sizes.

It does matter if you plan on recording a lot since you don't have unlimited storage
Edit: Fraps has a limit on the unregistered version, being a 30 second cap.

Lastly, PlayClaw loves to crash games, due to the way it hooks up with the graphics (I can't explain that very well, pardon the noobness), meaning every time you stop recording, your game usually hangs for quite a while. Sometimes that ends in a crash. Fraps does none of this. It's a known issue on the PlayClaw forums as well.

Never had this problem either.

Untrue, simply recording to another drive does not slow down anything. It's not "moved" to a different HDD in any other fashion that if you were recording to the same drive as Fraps is on. Recording to a different HDD than Fraps, does not, in any imaginable way affect performance, in and of itself.

Funny, because whenever Fraps was on a different drive my games were stuttering like mad when I started recording. This was solved once I put Fraps on the same drive as the save folder.

[moaradin]

I use Xfire, look up a guide on youtube if you like.

Also record onto a second hdd, to reduce lag in the game and on video, when recording.

Xfire's video is real good, but what I found out the hard way is that Xfire doesn't sync audio, so its pretty worthless to me.

---------- Post added 2011-01-23 at 04:43 PM ----------

There is no competitor to Fraps in terms of Quality, but if you are going to record 1080p videos, you need a beefy quad core and more than one good HDD.

[blade5o]

I've been using fraps and Sony Vegas for editing. (if you want smooth looking videos 480p +, go with Sony vegas or something other then windows movie maker)

[denominator]

Just chiming in the I find Playclaw much better than fraps. I've also bought it and never had any issues.

[Diegles]

I just downloaded Play Claw, figuring I would try it out instead of Fraps.

Now I run a Quadcore processor, able to chose up to 8 cores, so I did that and tried to run WoW, this gave me an error, I wasn't able to run wow because of memory issues(Weird, i have 6GB ram on a x64 OS). I did wow repair thinking wow had bugged, didn't work, rebooted, didn't work. Turned off Play Claw, worked instantly.

I will still use fraps, thanks for the tip though. Maybe in a few years I can use it.

[BicycleMafioso]

Xfire's video is real good, but what I found out the hard way is that Xfire doesn't sync audio, so its pretty worthless to me.

Interesting! Since I care not for WoW-sound, this might be an option for me.

[Ricje]

Now I run a Quadcore processor, able to chose up to 8 cores

Might want to try running it with 4 cores

edit: It's basically like a car. Just because a car can drive 200+ km/h doesn't mean you have to

[Cilraaz]

HDD usage
Fraps: 2:40 minute record = 3.7 GB = ~23 MB every second
Play Claw: 2:04 minute record = 641 MB = ~5 MB every second

Record cap
Fraps makes a new file every 4.096 GB (4 GB)
After recording for 12 minutes 53 seconds and the file reaching 4.2 GB it had yet to make a new file.

All this shows is that Play Claw outputs pre-compressed video. Personally, I'd rather have the near-lossless output from Fraps. That way I can handle the video however I want. Anyone serious about video would always want the original source to be as close to lossless as possible. Anyone serious about video would also have the storage required for it.

As far as the "cap", that's just a file split. The data is still continuous and the files are easily spliced.

[moaradin]

Most people use Sony vegas or some other program to compress the video anyways. A 10 min fraps video for me is around 100gb. I use sony vegas to compress it in 1gb and the quality difference is barely noticeable.

[Deleted]

camtasia, pretty awsome imo

[Asera]

Be wary of Playclaw.

Yes, it works great. But I've had several raid kills' footage screwed up because it decided to drop frames in the video, without any FPS drop ever happening in the actual game - in the footage I had afterwards though, there were serveral 5+ seconds long hiccups. I was recording to a clean SSD drive, so, that was hardly the problem either.

Fraps never did this to me, although you have to suffer slightly larger amounts of data being written to your harddrive, and more apparent FPS issues in game. Depends though - I've often recorded a full 10min raid without really dropping below 60FPS for more than a second.

PlayClaw, due to it's on the fly compression, is more load on your CPU (and probably memory as well) than FRAPS.

And on the other side, FRAPS is extremely heavy on I/O due to the huge files it makes, leaving the CPU and Memory not nearly as taxed. And if you're in a boss fight, drive paging won't happen too often as most of that comes from travel in WoW.

[yrichard]

Try D3DGear from d3dgear.com, it is much fast and supports HD recording.