Video Capture

Yes I know that this has been mentioned so many times but has anyone ever found a video capture utility that will work decently on a 1.5ghz machine as I cannot find one.

I have tried Fraps, Camtasia, GameCam you name it but they are all far to slow on my system. In fact I find it quite ammusing that a 1.5ghz system still isn`t enough these days. Sure it`s not the latest but I remember running apps like LightWave on an Amiga 1200, decently I might add.

Any help would be great. BTW it doesn`t have to be free.

Jason.

Are you talking screen capture or external video source?

Screen capture. Like for example from my desktop or a game I am playing that is contained in a window.

Jason.

I have a question on topic - is there some free software to capture streaming video from windows media player (and the scedule function would be nice too)?

I've got a 2Ghz system which is only slightly faster and Fraps works fine. Having said that, my 2Ghz machine boots faster than a friend of mines 4Ghz system that has twice the RAM and a faster hard disk and bus speed.

It's not because of anything special i've done - except that I dont install junk. Anything and everything in the startup is stripped. A defrag might also help.

Fraps and other tools *will* impact the framerate, so if the game was barely playable before it's going to fall short of the hurdle.

Another application of a similar nature is Hypercam, you could try that.

Of to try HyperCam, thanks for the tips. As for junk on my system I have just done a fresh install so it`s not that. I think these tools are just processor hungry. What sort of framerates can you capture at Banshee? I hear that running in 16bit mode instead of 32bit also speeds things up.

Jason.

No luck with HyperCam although it did perform the best of the lot for me. Any other recommendations, is it practical to save straight out of Blitz somehow?

As this is a common question in this community it would be nice for someone to realease a low system requirement video recorder as it`s something that`s always good to have around.

Jason.

This is a good question but to be honest it soo much depends upon the game. I use delta timing so if my game slows down it compensates and copes, on the two streams i've released on the net of my games i've produced final movies at 15fps to keep download size down so I guess you could lock your fame to an fps rate and achieve better results.


It depends entirely upon your graphics card, some more modern cards actually run 32bit faster than they can 16bit. There's no rule to this that i'm aware of, but if it is shader 2 equipped stick to 32bit, if it's shader 1 then either mode may achieve better results.


Yes perhaps. It depends how you have done your timing code but there is nothing to stop you locking the "framerate" of the game to whatever final fps you want your movie to run at - whether it plays at that speed whilst you export the movie or not - that way you could just save out a series of images and import them into a movie editor.

So what spec PC would be needed to capture a video at say 60 frames per second? Also does the choice of codec slow things as I assume the video is condensed as it is being recorded and this is what causes the slowdown or am I wrong?

Jason.

TV-out card + DV-videocamera will take perfect video grabs no matter how slow the comp is. DV-cameras are getting cheaper, you can get one with video-in connectors for ~500€ these days.

Thanks Mustang, that`s an option I didn`t even consider.

Jason.

Just remember that 25 fps is plenty for a video playing :o) There's no need to capture at 60 fps.