Alternatives to FRAPS?

[Guest]

:p

Well, that's nevertheless an argument.

 

How are the other tools doing on the other hand?

After prolonged testing, they stink by comparison. For doing lossless game recording, MSI Afterburner is just as fast as the other tools while using less memory. (Plus, I have no need for lossless compression, hardware-accelerated or otherwise, as I'm not doing any 4K+ recording.) Top it off with the non-existent price tag, and I can see why you love it so much.

[Guest]

I would use MSI Afterburner if the UI wasn't so confusing and clusterfucky, I hate how you need two separate programs just to get one thing setup, it's all very confusing.

[Mirh 102]

If it wasn't that Rivatuner settings actually are an added feature lacking in the other programs rather than something standard split randomly.

I mean.. I wouldn't know if other alternatives let you use different hooking methods.

 

99% of times you don't need them afaik.

And btw, there's not only afterburner built around rivatuner. Try EVGA precision if you'd like a more aggressive UI (my experience is mixed with that though)

[Guest]

I would use MSI Afterburner if the UI wasn't so confusing and clusterfucky, I hate how you need two separate programs just to get one thing setup, it's all very confusing.

Use the gaming skin. It makes things so much cleaner. Also, that second program can be mostly configured right from MSI Afterburner - including setting up keybindings for video and screenshot capture. You'll only need to touch RTSS directly for those odd cases where it can't hook into the game you want to record (assuming said game isn't using DirectX 7 or earlier).

 

EDIT: Plus, RTSS and MSI Afterburner (this is with the latter's low-level hardware access turned off as it's unneeded for video/screenshot capture) have a combined memory footprint of 15MB. By comparison, FRAPS uses ~30MB, and Dxtory uses a whopping ~50MB! I honestly don't mind having two programs when they're quite clearly using their memory extremely efficiently.

[BONKERS 32]

Finally, I can post. (Clicking this thread took me to an RSS page oddly for a while).

MSI Afterburner + RTSS is unrivaled for screenshots. 
(UI Clunky? No way man. AB/RTSS have the most functionally workable UIs that are clearly and concisely laid out. In comparison to it's peers. I refuse to use anything else)

And Video...when you can get it to work >_>

I... I still use FRAPS for Video footage. Aside from the lack of updates (Perhaps due to piracy of the program?) and CPU overhead involved, I've never had too much problem capturing video with it.
It's lossless (Albiet with sub-sampled Chroma) and translates well to re-encoding.
 

[Guest]

I'll give it another try, I just find it incredibly frustrating to use. I'll probably write some instructions on a page.

Finally, I can post. (Clicking this thread took me to an RSS page oddly for a while).

MSI Afterburner + RTSS is unrivaled for screenshots. 
(UI Clunky? No way man. AB/RTSS have the most functionally workable UIs that are clearly and concisely laid out. In comparison to it's peers. I refuse to use anything else)

It wouldn't be so bad if the window was a tiny bit bigger.

[Guest]

Okay so now I see what really annoyed me, I didn't realize MSI Afterburner was using my Public folder which was kinda annoying. I didn't pay too much attention though seeing as I just hate this tiny ass window. I don't really know what settings to use.

[Mirh 102]

I don't see why people don't always use MKV containers.

Besides, NVENC encoding is available under external plugin.

[Guest]

Okay so now I see what really annoyed me, I didn't realize MSI Afterburner was using my Public folder which was kinda annoying. I didn't pay too much attention though seeing as I just hate this tiny ass window. I don't really know what settings to use.

If you have a spare 1TB or greater hard drive/hard drive array you can use, I'd use uncompressed video and save exclusively to that hard drive. Why? You'll be quickly accumulating gigabytes of hard drive space just for a couple of minutes of footage. Otherwise, what you have selected in terms of compression is good; that said, if you have a GPU which supports one of the hardware-based compression schemes (Intel Quick Sync, AMD VCE, or NVIDIA NVENC), you may want to try one of those as well. They'll give you great quality with minimum lag since your GPU's on-board H.264 co-processor will be handling the compression.

 

As for the other options...

• I'd use "full frame" frame size (unless you're doing 4K, in which case you may want to keep it as-is).
• Cap the frame rate using both the setting which just says "Framerate", which sets the video's FPS, and the Framerate limit setting, which sets the FPS the recorded game will be limited to while recording (using multiples of the video's framerate from 0 to 5, with 0 representing no cap), to either 60FPS, the maximum effective FPS for YouTube, or the FPS limit of the game you intend to record.
• Quality should be as high as your system can handle (i.e. 100% quality if your system can record without issue, something lower like 90% or 85% otherwise).
• Multithreaded optimizaiton should be left at "automatic" since AFAIK it doesn't suffer from the logical processor detection issue Outcast 1.1 does (see its article for more details).
• Enable the dedicated encoder server. What this actually does is tell RTSS to create a separate process which seamlessly bypasses the issue of using 32-bit codecs with 64-bit games and vice-versa.

Edited October 3, 2015 by Expack3

[Guest]

 

If you have a spare 1TB or greater hard drive/hard drive array you can use, I'd use uncompressed video and save exclusively to that hard drive. Why? You'll be quickly accumulating gigabytes of hard drive space just for a couple of minutes of footage. Otherwise, what you have selected in terms of compression is good; that said, if you have a GPU which supports one of the hardware-based compression schemes (Intel Quick Sync, AMD VCE, or NVIDIA NVENC), you may want to try one of those as well. They'll give you great quality with minimum lag since your GPU's on-board H.264 co-processor will be handling the compression.

 

As for the other options...

• I'd use "full frame" frame size (unless you're doing 4K, in which case you may want to keep it as-is).
• Cap the frame rate using both the setting which just says "Framerate", which sets the video's FPS, and the Framerate limit setting, which sets the FPS the recorded game will be limited to while recording (using multiples of the video's framerate from 0 to 5, with 0 representing no cap), to either 60FPS, the maximum effective FPS for YouTube, or the FPS limit of the game you intend to record.
• Quality should be as high as your system can handle (i.e. 100% quality if your system can record without issue, something lower like 90% or 85% otherwise).
• Multithreaded optimizaiton should be left at "automatic" since AFAIK it doesn't suffer from the logical processor detection issue Outcast 1.1 does (see its article for more details).
• Enable the dedicated encoder server. What this actually does is tell RTSS to create a separate process which seamlessly bypasses the issue of using 32-bit codecs with 64-bit games and vice-versa.

Ah the settings in the picture were the default settings, I still hadn't changed a whole lot yet. I tried the NVIDIA plugin but the quality was pretty poor, I guess it has something to do with my system. Anyway I just got home now so I'll probably screw around a little bit with all the compression settings.

[Guest]

I'm going to see if I can color correct this. But this is how my videos look with the nvidia plugin.

 

I'll just use the uncompressed setting, it works fine anyway.

[Guest]

I'm going to see if I can color correct this. But this is how my videos look with the nvidia plugin.

 

I'll just use the uncompressed setting, it works fine anyway.

...ew. That's not how it should look! Did you try clicking the button with the three dots next to the video format list when you had the NVIDIA plugin selected? That should bring up some quality control settings which will enable you to get better quality than...that ugly mess of default settings.

[Guest]

These were my settings. This doesn't happen on lossless.

 

For some odd reason it looks better in Window Media Player. Some color is still lost but, I'm not sure what happened. Kinda blurry.

 

VLC

[Guest]

I fixed it, just had to uncheck this box in VLC. (The YUV->RGB one)

 

The colors are correct now.

 

Sorry I was really annoyed seeing as I didn't understand why the videos looked all washed out, no matter what format I used, but now they are displaying correctly.

[Mirh 102]

That just seems like a player is set to use 0-255 RGB output values (full), while other is set to 16-235 (limited).

 

Besides, there's a gamma correction setting in MSIA.