Camstudio is a freeware screen capture program. I don't remember if I found out about it precisely from asking in these forum or not, but it might have been. In any case, either I don't know how to configure it, or the capture is not working as I want - it always has this sort of "laggy" / "bumpy" result (basically, it doesn't seem to capture all the frames).
This sort of sucks. One thing I would like to do with it is captures of sections of games and it doesn't work. It is ok for tutorials on configuring another program.
Is this a limitation of Camstudio (it is freeware, after all) or am I just missing something? If that is the best I can get from Camstudio, what program could I use that would produce a smooth / frame-accurate result? I think some of you even make some screen captures of games for youtube etc., so I think there is a good chance someone here knows.
Anyone uses Camstudio?
Re: Anyone uses Camstudio?
I'm not sure about camstudio, but I heard about people using a program called Fraps (http://www.fraps.com/) to record games. I've seen it in action and it works great, although some tweaking of the settings might be necessary to get a good framerate.
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lordofduct
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Re: Anyone uses Camstudio?
Keep in mind these screen capture video apps take a lot of power to push them.
1) First off you need the power to run the app you are capturing (lets say a video game... newer the game the more power it needs).
2) Second you need to grab the capture. This basically is done by cloning the video buffer.... it's raw data. Very large chunk of memory right there. And you need to dump it to somewhere that it can be used. Lastly if the video is locked in the video cards memory for like a game you need directX or something to gain access to it and logically dump out the data.
3) Now this frame needs to be compressed into a frame... now you can of course just dump it as is to the hard drive and string them together in a RAW-AVI, but 1 minute of video would be MASSIVE. So usually it's compressed, and that takes a ton of processing power as well.
So tie this all together. You've got large amounts of memory being dedicated to this. Along with processing power between rendering the game, accessing the video buffer and dumping, and compressing the video.
It's going to run slow. Now either you use what cycles you have available to you and try to keep the games frame rate at tolerable... or you just use what you need and make the game drop frames. Either way your 60fps game is going to end up 30fps when captured. Or less if your computer can barely handle the game as is.
I have had my best experiences with Fraps though. It tends to keep a good frame rate and it gives you all kinds of tweaks to try to get a better framerate.
1) First off you need the power to run the app you are capturing (lets say a video game... newer the game the more power it needs).
2) Second you need to grab the capture. This basically is done by cloning the video buffer.... it's raw data. Very large chunk of memory right there. And you need to dump it to somewhere that it can be used. Lastly if the video is locked in the video cards memory for like a game you need directX or something to gain access to it and logically dump out the data.
3) Now this frame needs to be compressed into a frame... now you can of course just dump it as is to the hard drive and string them together in a RAW-AVI, but 1 minute of video would be MASSIVE. So usually it's compressed, and that takes a ton of processing power as well.
So tie this all together. You've got large amounts of memory being dedicated to this. Along with processing power between rendering the game, accessing the video buffer and dumping, and compressing the video.
It's going to run slow. Now either you use what cycles you have available to you and try to keep the games frame rate at tolerable... or you just use what you need and make the game drop frames. Either way your 60fps game is going to end up 30fps when captured. Or less if your computer can barely handle the game as is.
I have had my best experiences with Fraps though. It tends to keep a good frame rate and it gives you all kinds of tweaks to try to get a better framerate.
Re: Anyone uses Camstudio?
I've used Camstudio to record usability studies before. It's a nice program considering it's free, but it isn't perfect. What you'll want to do is reduce the screen area to only what you need and make sure your game doesn't tax your system so much that there's no CPU power left over for Camstudio. Also, choose your codec wisely. Don't use something like DIVX which is very compressed. You'll need to use something with very little compression and re-compress it later.
Re: Anyone uses Camstudio?
Thanks for the advice everyone.
My PC is only dual core (Intel E8200, 2.7GHz) and is now around 1-year old, but still I would expect it to work with 16-bit emulators for example without looking so laggy. I have 4 GBs of RAM (in a 32-bit OS though) and a halfway decent vid card (GeForce 8800 GT - it was decent 1-year ago).
I think not compressing it first is a good idea, I'll check the settings and try some stuff.
My PC is only dual core (Intel E8200, 2.7GHz) and is now around 1-year old, but still I would expect it to work with 16-bit emulators for example without looking so laggy. I have 4 GBs of RAM (in a 32-bit OS though) and a halfway decent vid card (GeForce 8800 GT - it was decent 1-year ago).
I think not compressing it first is a good idea, I'll check the settings and try some stuff.
Re: Anyone uses Camstudio?
Also, don't play the emu full screen. Play it in a window, maybe 2x or something. Make sure it's not set to hog CPU cycles (normal priority process rather than high priority). Set the CamStudio screen area to the size of the emu window and position it where the emu will be played on screen. That way it will record less information.