Recording games and Desktop activity to create movies.

[Abbadon]

Hi guys,

I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice or share your experience with me regarding my latest experiment.

I have been trying to capture the activity of my desktop in the best possible quality in order to create tutorials, presentations and movies that then would be burned to CD-R and DVD+R media, so far I have been able to achieve very good quality using an ASUS Radeon 9200 video card by enabling the TV Out function of the card and using an S-Video cable to connect it to my TV Tuner card, which allow my to record in AVI or mpeg to a second hard disk, all of this in the same computer ( I call this setup retro-feeding ). I use an S-Video cable that is plugged to my TV card video out and the end to the TV Tuner.

Normal activities such as opening applications and not very demanding system tasks are recorded just fine, but all hell breaks loose when I try to record a game such as Unreal Tournament 2004, it is just impossible to get any decent movie or the system just crashes.

Now, I can also record to my VCR using a Composite cable while playing UT2K4 and the system, of course, works fine, but the quality is terribly low and even worse when I try to author a VCD or SVCD. Because recording from my PC to VCR does not cause any system workload I feel this is the best way to record games.

I would love to hear from you any thoughts or recommendations to get better picture.

Thanks for your time.

[thecoalman]

For your desktop try camstudio.

Fro games I've heard fraps mentioned as the application of choice. http://www.fraps.com/