Best in-game video capture?

Eric Chadwick

I'm taking another look at how to capture AVIs from our game runtime, and I found this old thread.
http://boards.polycount.net/showflat.php...=true#Post98226

I wonder if Poop's external drive worked great or not.

CamStudio and the like are not usable, they hit the CPU and HDD too hard, kills in-game performance.

Svideo out has too many quality degradations (low-res, interlacing, noisy, etc.).

Anyone have experience with external capture using another PC? I'm looking into VGA capture on a 2nd machine, seems like it'll do the best quality. Then I can resize/compress offline for the highest quality compression.

Ferg

Fraps is my current capture program of choice

http://www.fraps.com/download.php

Slum

Yeah, I'd say Fraps is the best choice. I could get decent results on my less-than-beefy machine. A friend's monsterous work machine captured video at something like 60fps (sorry, I don't have the specs for it, but i know he was doing dev for the 360 on it)

Eric Chadwick

Cool, I'll give Fraps a look. I'm lucky to have a quad-core setup here, sounds like Fraps uses multi-cores.

Richard Kain

Fraps has a trial version that lets you save 30-second clips. It sucks that you only get 30 seconds at a time. But at the same time, it gives you every opportunity to punish the software, and really get a good idea for how it will affect performance. You can also get an idea for which codecs and compression will work best for your compression. Definitely give a try first. I haven't bought a copy yet, but I found the trial version pretty easy to use. Put it through its paces. If it performs well enough for your purposes, it would definitely be cheaper and easier than a hardware solution.

indian_boy

fraps fraps! fraps? fraps!

that somes it up

Eric Chadwick

Tested it, works great, bought it. Thanks guys.