I have no problem at all using Fraps and WoW with Vista 32bit. I did have to disable SLI, however.

Glad it worked out for you!

There's so many things that can affect FRAPS performance greatly so don't go slapping yourself silly if you miss one :P

I hope this isn't too much off the subject, but does anyone have some advice for video compression, specifically in Sony Vegas? I'm a step or two beyond the OP and after finally getting Fraps to work on my machine and editing a short video I've become stumped in trying to give my rendered videos the look and quality of ones I've seen. Anyone have specific codecs, bitrates, or other numbers that work for them that they might be willing to share?

Btw, since the guide isn't very extensive but pretty good for setting options, you can do all this from vegas, without having to resort to use vdub. Vdub is pretty nice because it's free, and if you just want to make fast encodes and stuff, it just does that.

You also want to avoid wmv pretty much, it's not very good unless you use windows movie maker which is really easy to use, but not very powerful. You want to encode in divx or xvid, xvid being free, they're the most recognized format while still offering good compression and decent quality.

If you're a bit more elitist, you can encode in mp4, it'll cut size by almost half for the same quality, but sadly unless people use an integrated player(like VLC) or have mp4 decoding codecs installed, they won't be able to play it, and for most of the people that don't watch series or animes, they won't.

Googling encoding tutorials will help too, there's like a ton of them, and quite a lot are very good even tho not directly fraps/wow related. Add to that a Vegas tutorial and you're set.

Thanks, I followed that link and Pyros advice and went with xvid. So far excellent results.

mp4 is a container format, not a codec, and has almost nothing to do with file size. Unless you're trying to stuff Vorbis streams into an avi, the file size difference from avi is around 2%. Also, unless you're encoding one of the three videos that doesn't crash Snow, there are no codecs which come anywhere close to xvid's quality at half the size. Other than at extremely low bitrates, h264 generally only allows 10-20% lower bitrates for the same quality.

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.

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.