Howard Roark

I don't know if this belongs in here or public discussion, but I decided to put it here.

Anyways, fraps just plain doesn't work on some computers running vista, and some computers with specific AV software installed. The only decent fraps alternatives are Camtasia (old, clunky, not great quality) and Gamecam (clunky, bad UI, expensive). Also, fraps costs money.

You can sort of circumvent the need for fraps by using a couple of free programs. Here is a quick guide on how to set up your own free fraps alternative:

You need these 2 programs:
VHScrCap: VH Screen Capture Driver / Overview / Vladimir Hmelyoff's Software Laboratory (direct link to download here: http://hmelyoff.lgg.ru/VHSC_inst.exe)

And Windows Media Encoder:
Windows Media Encoder
(cant give direct link because of window's silly verification system, sorry. Check google)

Run VHScrCap

press 'create new one'

-press 'track window'
-select 'world of warcraft'
It's pretty simple, just make it look at World of Warcraft.
Leave it running in the background.

EDIT:
It seems it's much better/faster/simpler to just use Virtualdub as your encoding program. (check further posts for more info)
Virtualdub
File> Capture AVI
Device > ()VHScrCap
File> Set Capture File
Capture > Capture Video

but if you want to use WME,


Now open windows media encoder:
This box will pop up-


Go ahead and do "capture audio or video" (we'll talk about the higher quality custom session later), hit okay.
You'll get this screen:

Make sure video is selected and use VHScrCap.
Hit next


whatever file you want
hit next


let's do file archive
hit next


highest quality, sure!

Just hit next through the next 2 screens

If everything went right, you'll hopefully see something like this:


now hit "Start Encoding", alt tab into WoW, do something worth recording, and then alt tab back out and hit "Stop"

Congratulations, you just ghetto-engineered a fraps program

The quality is just decent. It's not as good as fraps and it uses a lot more resources than fraps during the encoding, unfortunately. But it's the best solution if you can't use fraps, as far as I know.

If you want higher quality video, you need to create a custom session and play around with all the settings, specifically the compression and encoding. I think the best way to get higher quality is using a different codec but I haven't played around with it enough to figure out what is best. So far I can get really really good quality but it's like 9 megs per second. I'm trying to find a happy medium.
Hope that someone might benefit from this. Enjoy.

 

tusaki

Hia, great tutorial.

Especially VHScrCap is a great find.

For encoding, I would recommend using something else than windows media encoder.

One of the best free open source encoding tools is virtualdub, which can be found here: Welcome to virtualdub.org! - virtualdub.org

For best results, capture using RAW data (make sure you have plenty of hard drive space). This will make sure you are not using any CPU cycles for encoding, so you'll hardly notice you are capturing a video file then.

Then afterwards, you can use virtualdub to encode it to something like XVID or DivX. (this can take a while)

Might write a small tutorial later, I did a few videos, but so long ago I forgot which settings I used (and liked). I remember re-encoding 5 minutes of the video over and over again untill I found the settings/speed/compression I liked.

 

Zenedra

Indeed if you capture in raw data you ease a lot of the pressure on the CPU and you might find this way of "frapsing" to be just as good as using the normal Fraps program.

 

Howard Roark

I didn't even know virtualdub had capture capabilites. I opened it up to try it out and it does work fine (and is simpler, too). Quality with whatever the default settings are is pretty good as well, and my FPS in game didn't drop below 50.
Though, it is 450 megs for 11 seconds haha. But with a good codec most of that quality can be saved.

 

Drunkmunky

Definitely the way to go is capture in RAW data and then run it through and encoder later once you have a finished and edited product is the best way of doing it. Takes up a lot of hard drive space but the finished product will have a better quality to filesize ratio and you can delete the original RAW data if you wish.

 

Lazaruss

Am I missing something or is all this capturing video in "RAW" data just normal capturing (pressing F9) in fraps?

 

Zenedra

It is. Although Fraps seems to capture RAW data with some kind of special Fraps codec because I couldn't play my RAW captured movies when I uninstalled Fraps and tried to play it. Also the codec analyser GSpot wrote that in order to play the captured movies I needed Fraps codec.

 

dill

fraps can't capture 1600x1200 stream on single processor system ( it captures in half-size mode instead). that's why i'll give that guide a try. thanks a lot for VHScrCap. Does anyone have an estimate of 1600x1200 raw stream size ?

 

Katherine

Rough guestimate:
1600x1200x32bit -> divide by 8 for byte conversion and 1024² for conversion to MB -> 7.32MB / Frame

If you capture at todays default TFT Screen refreshrate of 60Hz you will capture 60 frames a second, which leads to a hilarious amount of 439MB / sec or 25.75GB / min.

My math definitly gotta be flawed somewhere.

 

Marcel

Tusaki, such a tutorial would be very welcomed

 

Thebigcheeze

an easy way to figure this out is to just make a 1600x1200x32 bitmap in photoshop and just mutliply frim that.

 

tusaki

fraps only records at 30fps.. (optionally more) so it would be 12.37gb/min ... but yes, it requires a -lot- of hd space. 200gig free just to be sure.

the tutorial... i might have some time this week! we'll see...

 

valeea

Since im a passionate frapser myself i thank you for this interesting alternative guide!

One question: Do you have information about how cpu intensive this tool is compared to fraps? on my core duo i still experience massive fps losses when i start fraps. how does this work for your program?

 

Howard Roark

Well the sort of interesting this is that saving the uncompressed video with vdub takes very very little resources (like 4% more cpu load on my 2.6 dual core, not noticable) and the in game framerate hit is only like 15%. But the videos are gigantic.

The framerate hit was higher on fraps if i remember correctly, but fraps obviously has that codec that hits the 'sweet spot' between quality and video size.
Does anyone know what the fraps codec is based on?

 

Caryna

From my experience with Fraps this is how it works: it caps your frame rate to whatever you have chosen as recording rate (25 or 30). So for example if you had 50fps before starting Fraps you will get a 20fps hit by default (if you have set it to record at 30fps). If you get a hit worse than that then it is most likely to your CPU power or HDD speed.

Many people seem to underestimate the effect a different/fast HDD for recording has. When testing stuff and recording 1920x1200 @ 25fps on my 2.4GHz CoreDuo to my C: drive I had terrible fps (dropping below 10fps). Setting the target folder to a different HDD (physically, not just another partition) enabled me to record without any problems.

You know that you play too much WoW if you partners pants become a rare drop.

 

lsniper

Just found this post through google. But, I tried this on vista, and the end result is a laggy video. It records awesomely, but the end result isnt as great. Everything is clear, just laggy (WoW FPS is 40-50 while recording...end result = 5-6 FPS). Any way to fix that? >.<

 

å¢hïkê

Im having the same issuse with low frame rates, i lowered the video setting on wow too, great tutorial btw.