What are you watching the video in? Fraps records a raw take of your output, and that's going to be choppy in most video players until you compress it down using an encoder.

I find 'MediaPlayerClassic' plays the FRAPS raw files fine, try using that. VLC seems to not display the video at all, even newer versions, and I have no idea for other players since MPC is better then most in almost every way. MPC comes packed in with the K-Lite Codec Pack or you can grab it separately here (sourceforge prjoect).

Have to ask.. did you try and watch the videoclip while still having WoW open? Because then you have the problem right there

Don't know about other OS'es but Windows don't like running videofootage in any mediaplayers while having d3d games running in the background.

One of the problems with playing a fraps-recorded raw videostream is the resolution and bitrate, which requires quite a fast PC (compare it to high-definition playback 720p/1080p) and if you do this at the same time as having wow running in the background you will have some problems.

But as someone else stated - if you compress it and render it to another format/codec the choppyness will most likely be a goner.

If I were you I would stick to Divx if you can - seems to be the most widely used codec, since I've encoded with a fair number of different types for private and public videos. Divx had the most success, played with the least errors on different players, and required the least amount of "omg I have to download that codec, where?" from people. Finally, I also think the divx configuration/setup is the easiest.

I think, though, that unless you get DivxPro, you're limited in resolution to 1280x960 or something - but there is a free trial.

Windows has no problem with playing video while a game is running in the background. I generally do AH scans while watching anime without difficulty. The problem you're running into is that the video player isn't prioritized over WoW, so unless your processor is twice as fast as needed to play the video file, it isn't getting enough CPU time. This is easy to fix -- most media players have an option for "above normal" or "high" priority in the options somewhere, and if not you can manually set it with taskman (or just use a player that isn't terrible).

DivX and XviD are different encoders for the same codec (MPEG-4 Layer 2 ASP). They used to have fairly different levels of implementation, but there's pretty much no difference these days.

If I set the Fraps settings to 25 or 30FPS (how I want to render my video) I can't play smooth anymore because the frames are limited to 25/30FPS obviously. Therefore I changed the Fraps settings to 80FPS for a familiar smooth play. But...

I have read much information about compressing/rendering and its often mentioned the basic material vertices
should be the same all over for perfect results.

Question:
Can I set 30FPS in the project settings (in Sony Vegas) for 80FPS frapsed raw material and render it with 30FPS without any speed/frame poblems?

If done well, dropping frames to get down to 30 FPS should produce a nearly identical result to recording at 30 FPS. I would recommend sticking to frame rates that are multiples of each other (i.e. record at 60 if you're planning to encode at 30). 80 -> 30 doesn't let you drop a constant number of frames between each output frame, so Vegas may either decide to blend frames (very bad) or do a bad job of choosing where to have the shorter gap.

Fraps refuses to record in full-size for any resolution higher than 1152x864 or 1280x800 (as per the documentation). However, we've all seen movies recorded in higher resolutions than these. Is this done using some hack to fraps, or some other software entirely?

Edit... nevermind. I'll go update my fraps.

That used to be limited to the number of cores your processor had. Supposedly they've updated Fraps to handle higher resolutions on single cores, though.

I finally upgraded my Fraps to get the ability to record full screen 1600x1200 resolution and I'm having FPS problems. It goes from 70ish down to 10 when I start recording. I can record half-size fine at around 25 fps. I have a 1.8 GHz single core CPU, 6600 256mb video, and a 7200 rpm HD. Is it just the slow CPU holding it back or is there something else I can try?

1600x1200 has four times as many pixels as 800x600, so expect performance drop to be 4 times as big. Could even be worse since that's not only more data to process but also to put through your IO subsystem to store on disk.

I guess I'll try a lower res then. I actually found out my WoW is running at something a bit lower than 16x12, something like 1050. Changing around some video settings yesterday got me to 19-20ish while recording, it's so close to being playable.

Currently running a crap setup with a single core CPU (AMD Athlon 3500+) with a 20" screen running 1680x1050 resolution, and as I've understood it I can't record in full size at that resolution, so FRAPS automatically records in half size. My problem here is that the created raw file is extremly blurry and it's very hard to make something out of it. I've tried to encode it so that it's encoded the raw fotage for half the resolution I'm using ingame with little succes still beeing very blurry (same shit). FPS is not a problem btw, it's just the raw fotage that look crap.

Is my only option to run fraps with a lower resolution ingame to avoid getting blurry raw fotage or is there some way around this? I've been twisting my head around this trying to figure it out, but right now it simply feels i'm limited by my hardware, but still want to know for sure. Any help about this is greatly appreciated

Sorry for derailing this thread, but I feel this doesnt really deserve a topic of it's own and the OP solved his mystery already :P

I remember that I once had some strange drivers co-installed by my nVidia graphic drivers that caused all my fraps raw videos to be extremely blurry if I played them through Windows Media Player. Playing it in VLC or another player did not exhibit this strange behaviour and uninstalling those unneeded nVidia drivers (image quality something) fixed it.

If it is this, you can fix it easily. Of course some blurryness remains from the downscaling, but it shouldn't be very bad.

I've recently formated, and installed the 'latest' nVidia graphic drivers for my GF6600 Cards (No I'm not running SLI when I'm Recording).

I can't really find anything that I could remove that would be called image quality something :P, thanks though.

Is your HD formatted to FAT32 or is the file splitting a "feature" of fraps?

It's a limit of the AVI-container actually. There's a variant or extension that allows avi files to be larger than 4GB but that's not standard and fraps simply can't do it at this point. See also: AVI File Size Limits - Luke's Video Guide

Taksi: Video capture/Screen capture for 3D applications Might be able to.

Taksi doesn't do audio, unfortunately.

Most performance loss might be suffered due to 'bad' drivers. Remember, latest drivers doesn't mean they are best.

You might want to look 3dguru.com forums or similar sites for more detailed info.

There might be many bottlenecks, poor motherboard, HDD, system and bios setup and many others too.

Just to compare

stock E6600
1gb ram
8600GT
7200 RPM 160GB HDD
1680*1080 fraps recording without AA and AF in game at max details had stable 30 FPS+
Win XP 32bit and good drivers.

and my home PC

Athlon 2500+@262x11 (2772mhz) running 2x 512MB 2-2-2-11-1T fsb/ram ratio 1:1
GF4Ti 64MB
7200 RPM 80GB HDD
Win XP 32bit
1024*768 in game (But i think fraps was cuting to 800*600), lowest details , no AF/AA stable 20 FPS+

On above PC happened to me to record thaddius with 3-4 FPS during whole encounter becouse i've been using best available counter-strike drivers for GF4Ti. Havent had problems with playing though

I'm wondering if anyone else has had similar problems with this:

Before upgrading my hard-drive I was tight on space, and I was recording a movie for factual reasons more than for releasing it. So I switched fraps to half-resolution mode. Since upgrading my hard-drive it doesn't matter how much I play with the fraps setting, it still records at half-res. I've tried pretty much everything short of wiping fraps completely off my hdd and starting over.