Best way to record PC gameplay

Gimpymoo said:
The Live Gamer HD is acknowledged to be better than both.

The BMIP specifically has more than its fair share of problems.
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was that released in the past year or so? i forgot to say in my post, but when i got my gaming PC my interest in recording stuff using a PVR dwindled a lot so i havent really looked into it recently
 
FRAPS is by far the best if you have a decent PC and want good quality videos.

If you're running something on a lower end machine the MSi Afterburner is the way to go. The only issues i've had with recording with Afterburner is that it won't record game and mic sounds, no idea if it's been fixed or not though.
 
Dxtory for me, have never noticed a framerate loss while recording. The quality of recordings are a bit over the top though, 50+GB per 30ish minutes of footage :p.
 
chid76 said:
+1

I have tried allot of different programs and afterburner captures in 720 and I only seem to lose about 7fps in BF3. If I get something I want to keep, I then compress the files to .mkv file format with a free program called Handbrake.
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Does afterburner still have that BSOD bug that had on the time of the Battlefield 3 release and Bad Company 2?

But this loss is when you are recording on the HD which the game is installed, right?
 
Sin_Chase said:
For local capture - Dxtory.

Nothing compares to it for power and flexability. It makes Fraps look like a toy.

Use Lagarith as a codec with Dxtory and you have near pixel perfect capture with very little overhead compared to some other solutions.

Small sample clip of Battlefield 3 in 1080p to give you an idea of quality, was rendered at ~7Mbit/Sec prior to Youtube receiving it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H36Ouo7AxRY
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I tried Dxtory some weeks ago and discovered it need a very large bandwidth.
Will search on Lagarith and test it.
 
~>Dg<~ said:
i use fraps tried em all .

people getting bad frames have it set wrong .
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The fact is that it still costs significantly more FPS than Afterburner (based on my experience and everything else I've read). I seem to remember you saying previously that you locked your FPS at 60 and didn't get any FPS loss, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't cost you FPS compared with not recording.

For value for money (as it's free) and ease of use I like to use Afterburner, and I've never had any problems with the quality of recordings.

Just a note re Afterburner - you need to screw around with codecs if you want to import the footage into Sony Vegas, as otherwise you can't see the video.
 
Afran said:
So which is the best for a lowend system hoping to upload to youtube in 720p? Fraps I currently use though certainly wouldn't say I don't have FPS issues :)

23:40 onwards for example on this video of mine; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66IV2j5zdyA
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MSI afterburner and fraps are pretty much tied if you get the paid for version of FRAPS but it might be worth seeing if you find any difference on your system. if you've only got the free version of FRAPS then get MSI afterburner. to avoid the whole 30 second limit and non existent format selection for screenshots
 
Fraps works fine, but sometimes a single HDD is too slow for 1080p @ 30fps. Most games record fine, but something like Crysis (with all its foilage) just overwhelms my HDD and the recording becomes choppy. Changing to a different HDD to the one the game is installed on helps a little, but it's still choppy.

I know its the HDD, because when I switch to my SSD it's totally smooth, but having only 170gb free on my SSD isn't exactly ideal and I don't like writing massive amounts of data to it anyway.

I think for best performance from FRAPs, a raid-0 HDD array would be ideal as the high sequential writes would be ideal for video capture. The other option is to drop to a lower res (e.g. 720p) or possibly a lower frame rate (24fps still looks good with certain games).
 
I use both Fraps and XSplit, while fraps does destroy the frame rate it does produce the best image quality.

XSplit however I've been using quite a lot because on my set up there doesn't seem to be any fps hit but the image quality does suffer a bit.

It's a trade off.
 
titaniumx3 said:
Fraps works fine, but sometimes a single HDD is too slow for 1080p @ 30fps. Most games record fine, but something like Crysis (with all its foilage) just overwhelms my HDD and the recording becomes choppy. Changing to a different HDD to the one the game is installed on helps a little, but it's still choppy.

I know its the HDD, because when I switch to my SSD it's totally smooth, but having only 170gb free on my SSD isn't exactly ideal and I don't like writing massive amounts of data to it anyway.

I think for best performance from FRAPs, a raid-0 HDD array would be ideal as the high sequential writes would be ideal for video capture. The other option is to drop to a lower res (e.g. 720p) or possibly a lower frame rate (24fps still looks good with certain games).
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Raid-0 only improves the sequential reads though doesn't it?
 
Either drop down to 720p or tick the "Half Size" option while running 1080p.

A benefit of 720p though would also be faster upload times. :D

Also there doesn't seem to be a difference between 30 fps and 25 fps on youtube, just my experiance with it.
 
thezakarum said:
Raid-0 only improves the sequential reads though doesn't it?
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Nope.

I run RAID-0 across 2 drives, both read and write speeds are as good as doubled compared to a single of those drive.

Different RAID levels have different performance increases in the read/write areas but a stripe will accelerate both reading and writing, RAID-0 is fake-raid (no redundancy) and no parity/mirror is written. RAID-1 (Mirror) for example has no write speed benefit but can provide a read benefit.
 
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Sin_Chase said:
Nope.

I run RAID-0 across 2 drives, both read and write speeds are as good as doubled compared to a single of those drive.

Different RAID levels have different performance increases in the read/write areas but a stripe will accelerate both reading and writing, RAID-0 is fake-raid (no redundancy) and no parity/mirror is written. RAID-1 (Mirror) for example has no write speed benefit but can provide a read benefit.
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Ah I see, cheers for clearing that up. :)
 
Sin_Chase said:
Games from the 90s early 2000s. :D

Not seen demo record feature in many moderns game. In-fact, I cannot remember the last time I even used it outside of the half Life engine. I miss the feature but to be honest it was flakey at best and rarely 100% accurate to what actually happened.
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Awesome feature!

I made an avi by recording demos of gameplay, running them in game and dumping sections (as BMP!) and then sticking them all together :D

Fun times :D
 
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