How do you people save your games in video format ?
 

I'm really curious. thanks for the info.

I use FRAPS to record a HUGE video file, then Microsoft Movie Maker to make it smaller to distrubate since DIVX's codec is now pay-to-use.

FRAPS and Adobe Video Studio 8 SE.

Wouldn't be better to use the free XviD cocec in .avi container, rather than Microsoft's .wmv? I have nothing against Microsoft, but the XviD codec is and excellent codec, and in most cases compartible with DIvX. My standalone DVD player, which is DivX certified can play 95% of the XviDs.

I wonder if anybody is able to capture from a dualhead (two monitors, not necessarily Matrox) layout. Is it possible? I can find a way to do it.

Or do you know some software to capture that allows to set the number of frames captured for each frame of game?

FRAPS then Movie Maker :D

There are two ways.

1. FRAPS. The newest version 2.80 is multi-threaded which means that your dual-core processor will get some use. Previously, it was serial threaded along with your game code. This is supposed to amount to a 20% boost in capturing frame rates, but to be honest, I haven't tested it.

The FRAPS codec is about like capturing a stream of low-compression JPG's. It's lossy, but very minimal.

Stuff all that into some kind of encoder, and output your movie. Virtualdub will handle H264, Divx, 3ivx, Xvid. Something like Tmpgenc DVD Author will handle MPEG2 DVD quality. Sound is another issue, but you can always just extract it with Virtualdub, convert it to whatever you want, and interleave/mux it back into the final version.

2. Buy some kind of capture card. I have a Plextor 402U that uses the S-video output on my video card, and a USB 2.0 back to disk. Only captures at 720x480p, and it's S-video quality, but it does well enough. It captures to CBR Divx-5 (@5000kbps), so you'd probably want to stuff that into something a little tighter. The high bitrate does manage to capture all the details that S-video will afford the codec, so although it is an intermediate compression -- there is a loss in quality any time you compress video using a lossy codec -- the quality is high enough to justify its use. Divx-6 on it's maximum search method would pull that bitrate down to 250kbps or less, saturated. H264 would do even better.

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Xvid is an excellent codec in comparison to Divx-6, but it requires some "tweaking". You need to use custom matricies because the standard 263/mpeg2 absolutely suck. PSNR is a poor judge of quality, and that is what the mpeg2/h263 matricies are designed to maximize. A custom matrix will keep the important details sharp, instead of just blurring the whole picture uniformly.

Nic's Xvid v1.2 has been "multi-threaded". I haven't used it, so I cannot tell you how well it's been threaded.

I would also like to remind people that the AVI container is terrible with VBR codecs. Ogg muxes the video and audio, rather than interleaving, which means that your audio and video can NEVER go out of sync. It uses a little more "overhead" to do this, but it amounts to less than 2% difference. On a 100MB AVI file, the Ogg version would be 102MB or less.

Try using growler guncam for video capture http://www.growlersoftware.com . It can export to xvid avi. I think it works better than fraps in SHIII.