Fraps Alternative

Vizion

Hey, I'm looking for a free FRAPS/XFire alternative for recording. I've tried them both and have had massive problems with them. Is there such thing, or is this just wishful thinking?

Aroduc

Wishful thinking.

Maybe try Hypercam, though I'm pretty sure it's got some rather annoying limitations unless you pay for a reigstration. Camtasia is pretty nice, but just a 30 day free trial.

Fig-D

Camtasia is nice, I did my Megaman X4 LP with it, but it's kinda pricey past the trial and I don't think that the quality was THAT good.

Shady3011

The quality of the output is more dependent on your encoder than the recording software though. That said, Camtasia is your best bet for a short, free solution.

Also, what exactly are your recording problems? You could be having hardware problems.

Vizion

Full quality capture was just too much to write to my harddrive. I'm looking for something that'll compress before it writes to the hdd. It's not like I'm trying to make machinima or anything, just maybe some how-to vids.

Shady3011

I never used Fraps before, but if it's just dumping a huge uncompressed file then I can see why that's causing problems. I say give Camtasia a spin. With the right encoder, you'll have great quality videos of decent length below 200 MB.

Vizion

Actually, I finally googled up something that might work for me. www.wegame.com is free and people are saying it does small files. I'll try it out and post back here with results

shadydentist

Doesn't capture audio, but taksi is an open-source alternative to FRAPS.

RandomEngy

FRAPS records to a special lossless (but still compressed) format I think.

Mordrack

RandomEngy wrote: »

FRAPS records to a special lossless (but still compressed) format I think.

Nope. It records to its own proprietary format that's uncompressed.
edit: My bad. It's compressed just not very much. Though it is lossless making transcoding ideal.

brynstar

If you don't mind paying a small amount, I've found that Gamecam works pretty darn well.

Morninglord

I just wanted to say I read this title without the first r.

I use ZD Soft Game Recorder. It's not free though.

apotheos

If you throw in compression it will drastically impact performance on any game that fully utilizes your available processing.

FRAPS is the best option around for quality output, you just need to have a computer up to the task.

Morninglord

ZD Soft can do straight recording too. I noticed about a two frame difference in doing so, it's compression seems pretty well optimised.

Aroduc

You noticed a .03 second difference? What?

(or .06 I guess if you're a heathen)

Morninglord

Aroduc wrote: »

You noticed a .03 second difference? What?

(or .06 I guess if you're a heathen)

Do they not have frame rate indicators where you come from or something? :P

darklite_x

I own FRAPS and I can tell you that I pretty much had to buy a new hard drive in order to utilize it. That said, it's still amazing capture quality.

Dehumanized

I've used that wegame client before... it's pretty decent.

Here is an example of something I recorded using it. Audio feed is just exactly what I was listening to when I recorded the footage. My goal wasn't to edit together something pretty, just to show what I did. There is a higher quality recording option available, I didn't use it.

I guess their software hooks into DirectX, which is supposed to be more efficient than fraps. I have no clue if that's true or not. I actually even emailed their team asking them to add in support for Audiosurf a long while ago and sure enough, support was added within a couple weeks.

skace

You can FRAPs at half resolution to save your HDD from thrashing too hard.

FreddyD

StreamMyGame has a built in recorder. I didn't notice much lag either so it must not be very processor intensive.

xzzy

If you got a second PC laying around, just dig up a hardware capture card. As 90% of the video that gets posted on the web is SD quality or worse, any USB 2.0 dealie will work and save you from lagging to hell while recording.

Doesn't need to be a beefy PC, anything 1ghz or newer is plenty. I did it on a 500mhz for a long time, but I was using a PCI card at that point.

Vizion

Well, I used WeGame all night last night, and I'm pretty happy with it. The only issue is that it doesn't support EVERY game like Fraps seems to, but it looks like they add support for games pretty often. Anyway, gets my seal of approval, whatever that's worth.

Suds

I've been looking for an alternative that has more audio options since I find Fraps really lacking.

I need to record several different audio streams and Fraps just doesn't let me do that ATM.

Dehumanized

Vizion wrote: »

Well, I used WeGame all night last night, and I'm pretty happy with it. The only issue is that it doesn't support EVERY game like Fraps seems to, but it looks like they add support for games pretty often. Anyway, gets my seal of approval, whatever that's worth.

Yep, if a game you want to record isn't supported try emailing them about it. They seem to be pretty responsive about that sort of thing.

Idoliside

Wegame also has audio problems with x64 bit processors.

Suds

I had issues with the sound and ZD Game Recorder, but that might be because the sound is also trying to be streamed through the internet to my remote client at work.