Looking for some guidance on fullscreen capture

[Ed Oscuro]

There's a Chrome app which is going to go bye-bye soon which I wanted to capture. I've fooled around a bit with ffdshow and CamStudio, but I still have to mess around with CamStudio's ms to capture frame / frame rate settings, and the program complains that 16ms (for 60fps...I didn't try 16.66 or 16.67 ms which would be closer) and 60 fps are out of sync. When I tried another close setting it seemed out of sync. The default settings were fine in terms of detail but there weren't enough frames per second for my liking.

I'm hoping to get as close as possible to 1920x1200 @ 60Hz as possible, and at a high level of detail too.

I've looked at VirtualDub again but it seems to want to limit recordings to a fraction of a full 1080p frame.

I also wonder how YouTube will handle (or not handle, as the case may be) the resolution, which isn't 1080p but rather a bit beyond it. I might try to experiment with this resolution but I'm not sure how to set it well while remaining fullscreen (my monitor, one of the Planar PX2611W series, doesn't do spectacularly with 1080p; I think it will show it but with some artifacts).

[blizzz]

I've never used vdub for fullscreen recording, but are you 100% sure that you've got it set up correctly?

Fraps should work too, it can record the fullscreen desktop. Try out the demo before you buy it to make sure.

[Ed Oscuro]

I've never used vdub for fullscreen recording, but are you 100% sure that you've got it set up correctly?

I'm not sure what to do with this question. Obviously there is something that doesn't please me, so in that sense, yes, there is something I am finding incorrect. But exactly what the solution is I cannot know.

Fraps should work too, it can record the fullscreen desktop. Try out the demo before you buy it to make sure.

I'm not buying FRAPS

Anybody else wanna take a stab at this? Any bits of advice, even if isolated to parts of this, would be helpful.

Thoughts on compression types (this content is mostly static pictures), settings etc. are welcome.

[Ed Oscuro]

FRAPS turned out to be pretty easy to use.

However, there is a problem - I keep having trouble determining if it's capturing or not. I have repeatedly opened a page in Chrome, and then put the Flash application into fullscreen, and hit F9 - only to finish recording to find that oops, it didn't record anything, just some shots of the program at fullscreen. I've been making sure to load FRAPS before opening the Chrome window, too, and hitting F9 only after the Flash application is fullscreen.

[DJ Incompetent]

Fraps is all about the framerate number in the upper left corner. Whatever window the number is in the corner of, that window is all it is capturing. When the number is yellow, it is not recording. When it is red, it is recording. If there is no number, Fraps is not focused on anything.

You may have to trick it to capture regular browser activity (prolly by being careful what screen you're on when you open Fraps). I was able to get the regular chrome browser in error when I was trying to capture Score Rush off Turbulenz.

[Ed Oscuro]

I turned off the counter in FRAPS, maybe I should turn it back on so I don't have to do a trial recording to see if I'm actually getting shit, heh

To get Chrome reliably, I have to close Chrome and FRAPS, then reopen FRAPS and then Chrome. Opening Chrome before FRAPS won't work. Switching modes (i.e. going from fullscreen Flash in Chrome to windowed) seems to reliably cut off the recording, too.

Anyway, I just gotta work on finding some more space-efficient codec and then I should be good. I figured out FRAPS a bit too late for what I wanted to get, but I'm good now

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

I also wonder how YouTube will handle (or not handle, as the case may be) the resolution, which isn't 1080p but rather a bit beyond it.

It will just reencode it as 1080p and all the levels under it. If you are really lucky you might also have it offer the "Original" resolution option, but I don't know what parameters are needed to trigger it and I've only seen it happen on other people's videos. But in general it lowers its encodings to the first below what you upload, so for example if you upload something that is 800 pixels in height, you get a 720p, 480, 360 and 240. If you have a way to encode it where it mixes/blends frames together going from 60 to 30 on your end you might want to do that before uploading, otherwise if you upload a 60fps video YT will just drop every other frame. That is why virtually every emulation video looks like frameskip dog shit and things like rapid blinking effects that made faked alpha blending effects end up having a graphic on for a second then off instead of looking alpha blended.

[Ed Oscuro]

I went with 30fps for these videos. Interestingly, the gamma level is a bit off (too dark), not sure why.

Yeah, I've noticed all the effects you mention for MAME videos. This project had nothing very graphically unusual about it (just sliding static pictures across the screen, basically) but that's a nice summary of MAME effects and YouTube, thanks for that.