Fraps Alternative

[German Muscle]

I downloaded Fraps and tried it out. This is terrible. I shot 15 mins of video and it turned into 25GB. While recording it stutters like crazy and affects my game. When i pulled it into an editor the stuttering was still there.
Im glad i didnt buy it. I would be furious.

Is there any alternative to this software thats good?

 

[Javatango]

If you are recording a Steam game, the Steam client now has the ability to record. I don't remember if X-Fire allows you to record or only displays FPS. Sorry, not much help here.

 

[criccio]

You didn't set it up correctly... stop blaming the software.

I'm on my phone or I would share how I have it setup.

 

[German Muscle]

If you are recording a Steam game, the Steam client now has the ability to record. I don't remember if X-Fire allows you to record or only displays FPS. Sorry, not much help here.

Steam games have the ability to record a demo. Thats a proprietary form and you have to play it back and record it using something.

You didn't set it up correctly... stop blaming the software.

I'm on my phone or I would share how I have it setup.

Please share your setup.

 

[SuperFly4]

I downloaded Fraps and tried it out. This is terrible. I shot 15 mins of video and it turned into 25GB. While recording it stutters like crazy and affects my game. When i pulled it into an editor the stuttering was still there.
Im glad i didnt buy it. I would be furious.

Is there any alternative to this software thats good?

I replaced FRAPs with MSI Afterburner http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/overview.htm

I've had no problems with short video clips.

 

[kuyaglen]

Is there any alternative to this software thats good?

Fraps is the best.

You didn't set it up correctly... stop blaming the software.

2nd'd

 

[Mr. Stryker]

Fraps is pretty much the best one. I get smooth videos even on low spec systems. Not sure what you're smoking.

 

[Sly]

The reason fraps is so smooth is because it doesn't tie up your CPU with compression tasks. The downside is that the uncompressed video uses a ton of harddrive space.

Any kind of stuttering you're experiencing is likely harddrive related. Make sure your harddrive is defragged and that you're not saving on the same harddrive as the OS. It'll be constantly writing massive amounts of data to the harddrive and would present conflicts if you had two applications accessing the same harddrive.

I actually have a separate harddrive for recording my games. 1680x1050@60fps, no problem.

 

[Kokain]

To achieve smooth recording while gaming:

Fraps is set to record on a different physical Hard Disk
Fraps is set to record at full size (no processing to half size necessary)
Last part is FPS. At 60fps it will be smooth as butter, but at 30fps it will cause you to play your game at 30fps.

I think those are the bits you need to make sure you set correctly. Leave the rest to Avidemux

 

[Snowknight26]

The reason fraps is so smooth is because it doesn't tie up your CPU with compression tasks. The downside is that the uncompressed video uses a ton of harddrive space.

The video Fraps outputs is actually always compressed. It can output either lossy or lossless video, but it's still compressed. If the application you record with Fraps is fairly static, the video will be smaller than from one that isn't.

Try it yourself:
Record your desktop with little movement for 10 seconds.
Record a game (same resolution) with hopefully more movement for 10 seconds.
Compare file sizes.

To achieve smooth recording while gaming:

Fraps is set to record on a different physical Hard Disk
Fraps is set to record at full size (no processing to half size necessary)
Last part is FPS. At 60fps it will be smooth as butter, but at 30fps it will cause you to play your game at 30fps.

That's some outdated info.
Having Fraps record at a smaller size increases performance.
Starting with 3.1.0, application frame rate isn't locked at Fraps's recording frame rate. As a result, recording at a lower frame rate will impact performance less than recording at a higher frame rate.

 

[-Dragon-]

I have a seperate partition that I record fraps to and just format it whenever it starts getting full, I think I have either 200 or 300 GB, having an empty partition ensures you get 0 fragmentation and the disk can just dump video at max right speed, for even better performance make it the first partition on the drive. This is even more important when you're recording super high rez, 2560x1600 even at half rez can make a full 4GB file in a few seconds for video with lots of motion.

 

[firas]

full size is not smooth with me in BC2 so I use half size (maybe it’s related to the hard disk write speed)
file size is big because its uncompressed, convert it to anything and the size would be ~5% of the original

 

[sirmonkey1985]

full size is not smooth with me in BC2 so I use half size (maybe it’s related to the hard disk write speed)
file size is big because its uncompressed, convert it to anything and the size would be ~5% of the original

most likely due to hard drive speed. i can't run fraps either. my frame rate drops into the 20's when i use one of my older 750 gig 7200rpm drives.. never had a problem when i was using my WD VR but ended up having to sell it.

 

[Sly]

The video Fraps outputs is actually always compressed. It can output either lossy or lossless video, but it's still compressed. If the application you record with Fraps is fairly static, the video will be smaller than from one that isn't.

Try it yourself:
Record your desktop with little movement for 10 seconds.
Record a game (same resolution) with hopefully more movement for 10 seconds.
Compare file sizes.



That's some outdated info.
Having Fraps record at a smaller size increases performance.
Starting with 3.1.0, application frame rate isn't locked at Fraps's recording frame rate. As a result, recording at a lower frame rate will impact performance less than recording at a higher frame rate.

A 50 gig per 30 minute game is hardly compressed (4Gig in under 2 minutes is not unusual), especially when you run it through a real compressor like h264 that scales it down to about 2Gigs. Calling fraps videos compressed is like saying huffyuv is small.

The alternative is gamecam, which actually DOES compress in real time. You have better have a good CPU, but the smaller files it makes meant i can use it for recording games that lasts up to two hours per round. Quality is horrible, but that's what you get when compressing in real time.

 

[criccio]

A 50 gig per 30 minute game is hardly compressed (4Gig in under 2 minutes is not unusual), especially when you run it through a real compressor like h264 that scales it down to about 2Gigs. Calling fraps videos compressed is like saying huffyuv is small.

O boy... Snowknight is about to lay the smackdown!

 

[Proxy]

Just set it to record at a higher FPS. If you have a half decent video card you will be fine and it will be nice and smooth.

 

[FrozenLiquidity]

X-fire does record video as well, but as others have said, fraps is the best.

 

[jadams]

You didn't set it up correctly... stop blaming the software.

I'm on my phone or I would share how I have it setup.

LOL you make some breakthrough with FRAPS you're not telling me about? Last you said it made your framerates too unstable. Kinda what the OP is complaining about.

OP is clearly trying to record at FULL SIZE (probably at 1080p+) @ 60fps or something to that effect. Obviously the hardware cant keep up which leads to the stutters.

The file size? Gotta keep in mind its recording @ 60fps and thus outputting @ 60fps. Thats literally 2x as many frames as a normal video which would lead to ~2x the file size.

 

[criccio]

LOL you make some breakthrough with FRAPS you're not telling me about?

Its intermittent and honestly it was only that time. Seems perfectly smooth now.

 

[jadams]

AWESOME! thats what we have a FRAPS thread in our forum for!

contribute!

 

[German Muscle]

I was recording 60FPS. It was live however. I may try to record using the in game tool then record that and see if its smoother. I am recording to the same HDD but i dont think recording to a USB drive would be any better.

 

[Snowknight26]

A 50 gig per 30 minute game is hardly compressed (4Gig in under 2 minutes is not unusual), especially when you run it through a real compressor like h264 that scales it down to about 2Gigs.

There are either two options. Compressed, or not compressed. 'Hardly compressed' lies under 'compressed,' so I'm not sure why you're contradicting yourself. Fraps does lossless compression on the fly. Heck, I just recorded my desktop (1920x1080) for an hour at 60fps without touching it and the file was just a few gigs. So much for that, huh?

Calling fraps videos compressed is like saying huffyuv is small.

You're comparing apples and oranges. Fraps outputs compressed video, there's no denying that; right off the bat your argument is invalid. Regarding the second half, Huffyuv is small, it just depends on what you're comparing it to. Compared to raw video? Of course. Compared to lossless H.264? Of course not. It's all relative.

The alternative is gamecam, which actually DOES compress in real time.

Fraps does too, see above.

You have better have a good CPU, but the smaller files it makes meant i can use it for recording games that lasts up to two hours per round. Quality is horrible, but that's what you get when compressing in real time.

You're given two options. The first is to use Fraps where HDD speed is the most important factor. The second is to use, say, gamecam, where CPU speed is the most important factor. From what I can gather, you're saying that you'd rather use what little CPU time you have left during gaming or what have you on encoding the video horribly? I know I'd rather have whatever program I'm running take up more HDD space without being concerned about performance (CPU time is more valuable than HDD time) than the other way around. Not to mention, if you go your route, you can forget about doing any video editing unless you don't mind the even-worse-than-horrible quality. But suit yourself.

 

[SirMaster]

FRAPS is good and all but I've found this to work a lot better actually:
http://dxtory.com/v2-home-en.html

So if the user is looking for a good alternative.

The best thing about this is is records to multiple hard disks at once to eliminate that bottleneck from high quality recordings. Something FRAPS can't even do.

 

[jadams]

Imagine how resource intensive fraps would have to be to re-encode your screen on the fly into something manageable on top of what its already doing.

Lets be serious here.

 

[Sly]

@Snowknight26
There's more than one way to skin a cat, and i explained the advantages and drawbacks of the two ways you can capture video. I record both 2 hour clan games (2 hours for one game, i kid you not), and 20 minute public games regularly. It's always a tradeoff between video quality, cpu, and storage space. You can't have them all. Fraps (Low CPU, high storage), or Gamecam (high CPU, low storage), your choice.

I do a lot of video compressing and editing for uploading 1080p and 720p on youtube as well as for anime fansubs. It would seem that my video encoding standards are different from yours, because IMO fraps codec does not qualify any more than huffyuv.

And FYI, ever since i've upgraded to 1TB, i've always been using FRAPS (I now have a 400Gig partition dedicated to it, and the OS and game are on a different physical drive). But the rest of my clanmates still don't have that luxury, so far, i'm the only one that can record an entire game coz no one else is crazy enough to set aside that much space. But back when i still have just a 300Gig harddrive for everything, it's either gamecam, or i can forget about it.

 

[Snowknight26]

Qualify for what? Both the Fraps format and Huffyuv are essentially intermediate formats, the ideal candidates for encoding from.

 

[Sly]

Yeah, they're ideal sources since they're lossless, i actually use huffyuv for editing. But calling them compressed is pushing it since there's an alternative that actually does compression.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

I replaced FRAPs with MSI Afterburner http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/overview.htm

I've had no problems with short video clips.

Just wondering, does the OSD in Afterburner show up for 64-bit games? Because Rivatuner's won't.

 

[Dmitri]

Dxtory. Thread closed.

 

[sirmonkey1985]

Dxtory. Thread closed.

thanks, definitely going to check this out since i have 6 hard drives in my system, would be cool to see how this works.

lol nevermind, trial version doesn't even let you do anything other then set it up. no point in even giving the person money if you can't test it out.

 

[Yoshiyuki Blade]

Actual uncompressed video will give anyone a heart attack and makes one appreciate how much Fraps can capture and losslessly compress in real-time, despite how relatively large files can be.

There's really no decent alternative to Fraps really, especially if you're quality-oriented. I can't think of a good alternative for real-time lossless RGB software capture. It's a matter of having the hardware to accommodate specific conditions. For archiving, converting it to YUV 4:2:0 will cause a loss in chroma information, so be aware of this if you want to keep true originals. There are a couple of ways of saving a tremendous amount of space through using AVISynth and x264, but it can be a bit impractical.