GameBanshee Forums

I would like to capture some video from a game of mine I'm playing, however - I'm a total newbie when it comes to such things, so ....

I was wondering if anybody knew of some video capturing software which can be run from a game.
I know of - and have tried a demo/trial of Fraps, but it both create ungodly large files (several hundred megs per 30 sec), and it seems to cause issues on my machine/game, so I wouldn't really like to buy that software and use if there are quality alternatives which might work better for me. Which is where SYM comes into play - anybody have experiences with alternative video capture software and can point me in the prober direction.


First step will be to capture the video from the game - second step would be to compress the files into something more manageable .... what would be use for that?

personally i got no real experience, but i've heard that gamecam is a good movie-maker. you'll have to check yourself tho..

I'm actually having a very similar issue - I want to capture a video of the screen - and what I've found so far is that video-capturing software tends to either encode in ungodly huge uncompressed avi or in some badly-supported home-brewed encoding (which I end up transcoding to uncompressed avi so that it's universally playable). If you find something that can encode its video in divX/Xvid/quicktime I'd be very grateful to hear from you. Right now, I'm just sticking to encoding uncompressed video with Quicktime Pro.

If my info is correct from what i've heard, fraps provides the best quality eventho it lags your comp(if it's online game)

gamecam doesn't lag your comp but the quality is lower.

I haven't heard of any program that actually doesn't create insanely large files upon "taping it"..

the thing is that when you process it into a movie and add possible music and intro/outro to it, you can improve the quality of the movie which naturally increases the size of the file, and if you dont compress it with some sort of a program, any decent quality video will be counted in gigabytes even..

A friend made a movie in WoW, a boss kill that was really nice quality(comparing to the average movies) and it wasn't that big file to dowload in the end, but he used some program to compress it that costs was it 1000 or 6000euro's so not really for the everyday man.. tho i'm sure there's cheaper/free one's even out there.. Just remember that the final product when compressed won't be as huge as the original thing you tape.

(no idea if this helped at all, or if u knew it already or if my info is accurate, but let's hope so )

I really can recommend fraps, it's what I use myself. You must realize that these ungodly huge files contain outstanding quality. Fraps gives you this by default so you can compress it yourself to any size/quality you prefer. If it were to create small files by default you wouldn't have a choice later. You'll need to have quite a bit of hard disk space to make a long movie. But once you compress it (even with windows movie maker) the size will be greatly reduced.