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.

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?

I'd suspect you are a little optmistic expecting your system to record at that resolution. Mine slows down substantially at that rez (2.4ghz DualCore at 3.2ghz and 2gb of 1066 ram / 8800GT).

Obviously transfer rate to hard drive is also an issue, but that's relatively cheap to fix nowadays.

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.

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?