This is a comparison of the 4 most popular recording softwares, I will be comparing video quality, audio quality, performance and resulting performance(what I mean by this is how well the video plays back on multiple different media players to make sure that its not the media player not playing it back good). The comparison:
(the numbers relate to the order I'm putting them in, not the rank of how good they are)
1.Fraps:
Video quality: Video quality from videos recorded with Fraps get amazing quality as Fraps uses a video codec called “Fps01” which is one of the best codecs out theres for quality, although its not THE worst but it very bad for video compression, the Fps01 codec uses a color space called “Lossless RGB” which is a lossless color space, when a codec is lossless it menas that it records EXACTLY the same colors and quality of the game/program your recording which results in bigger file sizes on the recorded video file but results in higher quality video.
Performance: What makes lossless so good is that if you have the hard drive space for it then using it to get great quality also results in better performance as(now to explain this next part, screen recorders record how many “fps” you set them to record, now what fps means is “Frames Per Second” which is how many “Frames/images” of your game that your seeing, most monitors only go up to 60 hertz which results in the user only seeing 60 fps, others can go up to 75 which results in the user seeing 75 fps, and some go up to even 144 hertz which gives the user the most smooth looking gameplay, so fps means how many frames that the recorder records at, so screen recorders are basically just programs that take extremely large amounts of images every second) it doesn't take the time and power from your PC to try and compress the images/Frames that it takes without losing quality(since most other recorders will use a different codec[that you sometimes can't change] that takes more time to compress the images to get smaller files but results in worse performance), although there are some exceptions to the rule that “Lossless RGB codecs are the fastest” as there are certain recorders that have changeable codecs that still get bad performance and also have huge files, from what I've seen, the Fps01 Fraps codec is not the best codec for compression but is the best codec for performance as it takes the least amount of cpu/gpu power to run, from my tests when I'm recording with Fraps(I used the task manager in windows 7 to see my cpu usage anf how much it would go up) I only get a 10% jump in cpu usage which leaves the rest for the game/program your recording to use. Another thing to mention about Fraps is how it handles the gameplay performance, the highest recording setting you can set Fraps to is 120fps(which is not really needed in most cases as 60 fps is perfect smoothness for not only video footage but also gameplay), now we know from what I explained before that the Fps01 codec is the best codec for performance but Fraps in itself chooses what framerate(how much fps your getting in-game) the game your recording should be running at to make sure that the framerate of the recorded video footage isn't unstable(what I mean by unstable is that sometimes recorders will have “framedrops” which are when the framerate of the game your recording or the resulting video drops to a certain point), I technically found out about the fact that Fraps chooses the video framerate yesterday(March 6th 2014) when I started recording a video for youtube(now I normally record at 60 fps in Fraps to get the best smoothness with my video footage and better game smoothness) and when recording Fraps will lock your game's framerate to what it says is good(which I thought to be locking your game framerate to what your recording fps is[recording at 60 fps then my game is locked at 60 fps and 30 fps is locked at 30 fps]) but when I checked the video footage later(I'm in Windows 7 so it shows the framerate of the video and resolution of the video file in the bottom of the windows explorer window when I click on a video file) it showed that it was 30 fps while when I was recording(now normally in big worlds in Minecraft[at the time of the recording I was in Minecraft] my fps is locked at what I specified but I was in a generated “Flat” world so I could test out little contraptions without lag) I was getting 60 fps, I'm recording with 30 fps for now until I get my new hard drive.
Audio Quality: Fraps has the option to record both your microphone and system audio(this means that it will record what is coming out of your speakers/headphones which results in recording your system and game sounds at the same time which means that you can have Fraps record your game audio, system audio and skype call at the same time), which I don't do most of the time as Fraps fuses the two audio sources into one audio track which makes it impossible to edit the audio without screwing up the game sounds(I have made the mistake of trying to do this with the audio fused and ended up with very terrible screwed up game sounds), I have also found that I do not like having Fraps to record my mic audio because not only is that reason above a reason not to do it but also Fraps doesn't really balance the mic and game audio volume levels very good so it ends up with you needing to be right next to the mic to be able to get your mic audio above the game audio, but most people like me who use Fraps(or any of the softwares I'm mentioning in this essay) use a separate program for recording microphone audio(I myself use a program called audacity[now that it stopped screwing up the microphone audio]) so they can change the volume of the game audio and microphone audio as they become two different tracks so people who watch the video can still hear your voice while also hearing the game audio(I make sure that I can hear both perfectly and theres no distortion or any of that stuff).
Resulting video playback performance: It really depends mostly on the media player its playing back in, but sometimes it really is the footage, I've had no problems playing back Fraps footage, the reason I'm including this part is that the Fraps video and audio both have extremely high bitrates and sometimes a media player may not be able to handle the high bitrates of Fraps files and play it back very slowly and laggy, I've got a little machine which handle most of my stuff fine and playing back the Fraps files in Windows media player is fine, the only problem with using Windows media player is that it crushes the white and blacks in the recorded video file which ends up making the video look significantly darker, but I don't usually watch my footage that way, I usually just watch the footage as I edit it in Sony Vegas Pro 12.0 and Sony Vegas previews the video without the crushed whites and blacks. Overall playing back the footage is perfectly fine unless you have an extremely low-end PC which was meant for stuff like word processing more than anything, although when you edit your video and render it into .mp4 or .wmv you can choose the bitrate of the video file(only in .wmv) which is default set to 8m which is perfect for most(99.99%) PC's.
2.Bandicam
Video quality: Its video quality is comparable to Fraps and Dxtory quality as its default setting is on a codec called “Motion JPEG” which has a quality drop-down menu which goes from 10-100 and is default set to 80% quality which is fine as 80+ quality is no different and only increase file size, but Motion JPEG is not a lossless RGB codec therefore setting it quality to 100 will still end up with lower quality then Fraps and Dxtory, although Bandicam comes with extra codecs when its installed which are installed with the product itself, you can change the codec of bandicam to any of these codecs(it also has an external codec option which allows you to use other codecs that you have installed on your system[fron the internet or already installed], but the problem with the external codec part of bandicam is that that option only supports 32-bit systems which has a VERY small number of exceptions[I've found some external codecs which work with Bandicam on my 64-bit system]), it installs these codecs when you install Bandicam: H.264(Intel{R} Quick Sync video), Xvid, MPEG-1, Motion JPEG, YV12, and RGB24. These codecs are all good except for YV12 and RGB24 as YV12 does good quality it is half lossless which results in not very good performance and big files, RGB24 is to me and anyone else who uses Bandicam the worst lossless codec as it doesn't change the game to any better performance than it is with other codecs and because its a lossless codec which anyone would consider a 200% lossless codec as it tries to focus all of your PC's power toward getting Super HD quality, you may be thinking “Hmm this sounds good isn't it?” but no its not, RGB24 gets 1 gigabyte of file sizes every 10 seconds of footage which will mean a 20 minute video using the RGB24 codec will give you 20 gbs of file size and pretty bad performance as it takes more power to make the video better quality then to give the person the performance he would assume he would get. The MPEG-1 codec is a good codec for getting great quality with extremely tiny video files, the problem is that if you want to use it you have to buy and download the MPEG codec(you may also think “why is it an option if you have to buy this anyway?” thats because the codec works fine on its own but if you try to open it in a video editor or try to upload it to youtube then in the video editor it will say it can't find a codec to open the video file with and youtube does not accept .avi files which is what MOST screen recorders output the video to be), H.264 Intel quick sync is a pretty good codec but its not a full proof video codec as half the time it will produces a broken, un-editable and unusable video file which will be about 5kbs of file size when its broken, but on the times that it works it gives off great quality and very small files which you don't need to buy a codec to use, although these sound like good codecs the best one to go with is the default Motion JPEG codec which puts out very good quality(if its quality is set to 80 or higher) and very small and editable files and is a full proof codec for use with BANDICAM ONLY as trying to set theses codecs in Dxtory or other programs will cause problems(this also applies to the FP01 Fraps codec), setting the Fraps or Motion JPEG codecs in Dxtory doesn't have technical problems but it can't start recording using these codecs(in Dxtory it has a phase it must go through before it starts recording, when you press your start recording hotkey Dxtory will start a “init/initiation” process which enables the codec then starts recording if it can enable the codec, if it can't then when you start your recording, Dxtory will show in it's framerate counter the little “init” text sideways and will stay that way if you try to set it to the Fraps or Motion JPEG codecs[they show up as two things in the codec selection menu for Dxtory, Fraps shows up as: “Fraps video decompressor” and Bandicam/Motion JPEG shows up as: “Bandi MPEG-1 Video Decoder{this is technically for MPEG-1 and not Motion JPEG but MPEG-1 and Motion JPEG use the same video recording and compressing technology/software so I consider them the same}”]).
Audio Quality: There are only 2 audio codecs that you can use with Bandicam, “MPEG-1 L2” and the lossless and perfect quality audio codec “PCM”, it doesn't really matter which one you choose as they both get basically the same audio file size, but I don't really rely on the MPEG codecs or other stuff installed with Bandicam as much as the other stuff, and I personally like the quality of the PCM codec more than the MPEG-1 L2 one as I know that the PCM codec is full proof and will not screw up. Another thing to mention is that Bandicam has a feature which fuses the audio files but disabling that will have your microphone and game/system audio split(the game and system audio will be fused) into two different tracks which allows you to change the volume of the audio in your editor but most people still use an external program to record microphone audio(like me).
Performance: In Fraps a lot of the time the games I record with it get good performance depending on the fps I have it recording at(I don't consider 30 fps as bad performance) but in Bandicam's case it depends mostly on the game for performance, Bandicam is supposed to leave your game framerate alone and record at what you set but from my tests(and others) most(99.98%) games will get locked framerate from Bandicam and tons of framedrops, VERY rarely does Bandicam not lock your framerate in a game, and on their website they say that Bandicam ”uses the least amount of power and is perfect for low-end PCs” this is a lie as on low end PCs most games you will try to record with Bandicam will get you a HUGE framerate drop on any settings, I have tried out Bandicam on a lot of games and most of them got terrible performance, in Minecraft I got 8-10 fps with Bandicam and got me a 90% cpu usage jump, recording my desktop gets me an 80% jump, when it finds a game it can record without lagging and locking your framerate it ends up only giving a 30 % cpu usage jump(they also claim that it uses the least amount of cpu power to run which Fraps uses the least amount of it{with Fraps in most of my games I get a 10% jump in cpu usage}). But then again it vaires from game to game for this type of performance, but most of my games that don't lag with Bandicam still gets me 30% cpu usage jump.
Resulting video playback performance: Videos in Bandicam don't get as high of bitrates on the resulting files with Fraps and play back fine in most media players but Windows media player still crushes whites and blacks.
3.Mirillis Action!
Quality: Video quality of Action! is very good and matches Fraps video quality, it doesn't use a lossless codec but the codec it uses has a new thing added in which keeps the lossless visual quality and compresses the video file efficiently without losing quality or performance, its codec is a codec which will cause the same “init” problem in Dxtory which is a shame but still works good, its codec is a codec you can only get when you install Action! And cannot be gotten any other way, its codec is called the FICV codec which is maed by Mirillis themselves for use only with Action!.
Audio quality: Audio in Action! I assume is PCM for best quality, a problem with Action! Is that it fuses the audio tracks just like Fraps, it has an option to record the microphone audio into a different audio track but it has a glitch with this option because for some reason when enabling this option the video file ends up with no audio at all, which is why I use audacity for recoding my microphone and just have Action! Recording my system/game sounds. A slight fix that Mirillis made to it before knowing of this glitch is that sort of fixes it is that it has an “audio balance” slider in the options which the higher the mic audio is put the lower the game/system audio is put to fix this slightly but most of us have microphones which have background noise and wish to edit it out which is why most of us use an external program for recording mic audio.
Performance: This recorder has a function in it to leave your game fps alone and recording at what you specify which works on low end PCs as it also leaves the game fps alone on low end PCs. I had about a 30% jump in cpu usage when recording with Action!.
Resulting video playback performance: Perfect and no crushed whites or blacks, I should have mentioned this earlier in the essay that the higher the bitrate of the video file the more crashed the blacks and whites get which results in even darker playback on Windows media player(I don't know why Windows media player does this, I think this is a way to compensate for the high bitrate to play the video at full speed so it ignores the blacks and whites to go faster), Action! videos have a very small bitrate which allows it to play smoothly(without crushed blacks and whites) until the video file goes longer than 10 minutes at which point Windows media player crushes the blacks and whites again.
4.Dxtory:
Video quality:Excellent, on the codec that is installed when you install it, the video quality is unrivaled, it has 4 different quality settings, RGB – True Quality, YUV24 – High Quality, YUV420 – Medium Quality, and YUV410 – Low Quality, on YUV420 medium quality or higher there is no difference in quality, I use a different codec for recording with Dxtory called the UtVideo codec suite on the UtVideo YUV420 part for good quality, theres no difference in quality between the default Dxtory codec called the “Dxtory Video Codec” but when I installed Dxtory I don't know what happened but it didn't install the codec correctly and when I try to use the Dxtory video codec it crashes the game I'm trying to record.
Audio quality: Perfect as it uses the PCM codec by default for audio, it does not allow the user to have the audio fused so when recording and checking the audio later, the microphone audio and game/system audio is split into 2 separate tracks, another thing to note about Dxtory is that it has the compatibility up to 8 audio sources.
Performance + Resulting video playback performance: Dxtory performs poorly on low-end PCs but when your PC can fully support Dxtory, you get not only the best quality, but the best performance out of all of these recorders, it leaves your game fps alone, has no black screens in the recording(recording glitch), has no framedrops, footage has the lowest bitrate of these recorders as it doesn't have crushed blacks and whites in Windows media player, has an overall better quality than Fraps, Action! or Bandicam, has smaller video files than Fraps(they do still get pretty big but not like Fraps files type of big). As for cpu usage, it mostly depends on the game and how good your graphics card is, to run this in my opinion requires a 1.5gb graphics card to run without any performance hit, sure it requires a lot of power but its worth it for the best performance.
Overall in my opinion, Dxtory is the one to use as my cousin has a PC with a graphics card that has 1gb of video ram(1.5ghs is preferred but when your trying to record Minecraft with Dxtory on a PC with that much video ram theres no problems with performance) in which he gets 150 fps when not recording with Dxtory and still gets 150 fps while recording in Minecraft, which when he used Bandicam, like I said that most games get locked framerate with Bandicam, well Minecraft is one of them, when he wasn't recording while Bandicam is open he gets about 75 fps because for some reason Bandicam lags your game even while not recording-(people will think that he had fps limit on but no it wasn't on) and when he was recording(he records at 30 fps) he had his framerate locked at 30 with CONSTANT framedrops and he couldn't even reach 30 fps while recording with Bandicam, he was getting a constant 10-29 fps with constant changing fps with stability, I told him that I will just test out Dxtory on his system to see if it would run good, and when he saw how much better performance he was getting with Dxtory, he switched from Bandicam to Dxtory, which just goes to show you that Exkode really put a lot of effort to make Dxtory the best recording software out there, the only problem with Dxtory is how much power it takes to run, but when your PC supports it fully then its worth the 36$ that Dxtory costs.
Another thing I forgot to mention above is the complexity of each of the recording softwares:
Fraps: Its easy to use and is usually on a “Click to record” type of complexity as its not that hard to set up and can start recording automatically.
Bandicam: Its also pretty easy to set up but still has some more customization options than Fraps and is usually on a “Sets up in 5 minutes” type of complexity.
Mirillis Action!: Its a little more complex than Fraps but is still very easy to set up but still lacks some customization options that Bandicam has, its usually “Sets up in 1 minute” for most people who use it.
Dxtory: Very complex and for most beginners is a NIGHTMARE to set up but if your as good as me you can set it up pretty fast, what I mean is that I already tested many, MANY different video codecs and settings until I got it just right, its either “(Hard to set up for a beginner) OR (Easy to set up for a professional or someone who has experience with this sort of thing)”, but of course with complexity comes quality which is what I believe as Dxtory handles up to 8 inputs for audio, has a live-streaming feature, has different profiles for each program it detects(which allows the user to have different recording settings for each game which is very ingenious as some games behave differently depending on your settings).
A note to wrap up this is that I am a person who prefers complexity to ease of use most of the time and prefers bigger video files and better performance(Dxtory, Fraps) than to small files with terrible performance(Bandicam and sometimes Action! gives me lag on some games). I can post pictures of my settings for each of these programs if suggested, and I hope you enjoyed reading this.
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Govna
How is this useless? I was just putting it out there so people who want to know what software to use, doing this allows them to make their own decision of what they want and helps them choose.
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SecretproHD
Fraps is a very good choice as it takes little to no power at all to run and your game runs as smooth as butter on 98% PCs.
I'm glad I helped you :).
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Govna
How is this useless? I was just putting it out there so people who want to know what software to use, doing this allows them to make their own decision of what they want and helps them choose.
You have zero kind of any evidence to support any of the claims you make. You don't even have filesize comparisons.
You have zero kind of any evidence to support any of the claims you make. You don't even have filesize comparisons.
I said in the review that Fraps and dxtory take a lot of hard drive space, and that even though bandicam files are small the performance is awful, and even though that Action files are pretty small its not fullproof and may up the recording, either by not recording at all or just breaking the video file all together. also most people think that 1 minute in Fraps is 1gb which is 100% INCORRECT it takes a lot more than just saying that Fraps takes that much per minute, it requires checking the resolution of the game, I can record 20 minutes of minecraft on its normal resolution and get like 7gbs out of it -.-.
You have zero kind of any evidence to support any of the claims you make. You don't even have filesize comparisons.
And I'm also going to make a comparison VIDEO of me trying out these softwares and comparing EVERYTHING, quality, file sizes, performance, complexity, which is better than this but I still wanted to get this out there
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I said in the review that Fraps and dxtory take a lot of hard drive space, and that even though bandicam files are small the performance is awful, and even though that Action files are pretty small its not fullproof and may up the recording, either by not recording at all or just breaking the video file all together. also most people think that 1 minute in Fraps is 1gb which is 100% INCORRECT it takes a lot more than just saying that Fraps takes that much per minute, it requires checking the resolution of the game, I can record 20 minutes of minecraft on its normal resolution and get like 7gbs out of it -.-.
And I'm also going to make a comparison VIDEO of me trying out these softwares and comparing EVERYTHING, quality, file sizes, performance, complexity, which is better than this but I still wanted to get this out there
Comparison videos, when concerning specific quality, are mostly moot aswell. Youtube just reencodes them either way.
If you were to at least mention the bitrate of the resulting videos with each program, under particular settings, or just mention the end result in filesize and the length, that'd be cool.
It'd be even better if you made little splices of the source video of each source and uploaded them so we could have a look, or use something like this if you know how to take a video of the same source material with each recording program, so we can at least see the difference in stills.
You did also forget to mention that the high bitrate files that FRAPS writes will need a pretty fast hard drive. Not to mention that if you're recording such high bitrate files to your system drive, or even just the same drive the game's running on you could very well run into troubles.
A section on how, if you have a faster hard drive dedicated to recording, FRAPS could very easily be your best option with a resource-intensive game, but if you have a slower, or only one drive, another recorder that compresses the video more may be a good trade-off with a less resource intensive game.
It's all about balancing HDD write speed and encoding-on-the-fly CPU usage.
I actually did a video comparing FRAPS, Dxtory and Action myself (with horrible audio, due to a few screwups on my part) that I could PM you for a comparison, if you like?
You did also forget to mention that the high bitrate files that FRAPS writes will need a pretty fast hard drive. Not to mention that if you're recording such high bitrate files to your system drive, or even just the same drive the game's running on you could very well run into troubles.
A section on how, if you have a faster hard drive dedicated to recording, FRAPS could very easily be your best option with a resource-intensive game, but if you have a slower, or only one drive, another recorder that compresses the video more may be a good trade-off with a less resource intensive game.
It's all about balancing HDD write speed and encoding-on-the-fly CPU usage.
I actually did a video comparing FRAPS, Dxtory and Action myself (with horrible audio, due to a few screwups on my part) that I could PM you for a comparison, if you like?
The high bitrates dont really matter unless your pc is very, VERY low on sources, I myself tried Fraps on a dell inspiron that was like 5 years old when I tried it and i got a very good video and my game didn't lag and it had specs and was slow as and I was recording to the same hard drive and the video was fine along with the performance, my current laptop has an intel HD graphics 3000 with 64 mbs of dedicated video memory and according to Dxtory I have about 60 mbs of write speed(when not laggy) and 40 write(when an hour has passed) speed which is more than PLENTY to support Fraps bitrates. also what do you mean by "I actually did a video comparing FRAPS, Dxtory and Action myself (with horrible audio, due to a few screwups on my part) that I could PM you for a comparison, if you like? " sure I would like to but to compare what?
Also heres a comparison of bitrates(I didn't include these because theres no real point as most people nowadays have a pc with at least 20 mbs of write speed which is good enough to support any of these softwares except for Dxtory which I now found out mostly needs a fast hard drive to run and not lag and Fraps,action and bandicam dont really need fast hard drives to play without lag as Fraps is processor dependent which only takes 10% to run, action is gpu dependent which still takes a lot less than the game your recording, bandicam is dependent on BOTH cpu and gpu and requires very powerful ones at that none of them but Dxtory is Hard drive dependent)
Fraps - Huge bitrates.
Action! - Bitrates pretty small but get bigger over time but are less HDD stressful as they only get huge after about 10 minutes of recording.
Dxtory - Big bitrates but smaller than Fraps.
Bandicam - tiny bitrates.
also no Bandicam which compresses the video file is NOT a good trade off as to get ANY good performance you need an EXTREAMLY beefy PC otherwise youl just get ty framerates.
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Honestly if you want recording software do research into Action! and fraps those are some of the better well known ones and both get you great video quality and both have simple menus that are easy to go through. I prefer Action! because the file sizes are way smaller compared to fraps.
Honestly if you want recording software do research into Action! and fraps those are some of the better well known ones and both get you great video quality and both have simple menus that are easy to go through. I prefer Action! because the file sizes are way smaller compared to fraps.
I prefer action too but the problem with it is that its not fullproof, a lot of the time now it either doesnt record when I try or it breaks the video file. None of them are actually full proof except for Dxtory, Exkode really put work into making Dxtory fullproof(no color glitch like Fraps that happen sometimes, no audio glitch where it doesnt record audio which happens with Bandicam, Fraps and action, theres no broken video files, framedrops, black screens, etc which is what I prefer as I'm one who would prefers bigger file sizes with great quality and performance then small files with bad performance or broken files) and another thing action still takes a little too much power to run sometimes and gets me bad performance which with Fraps even though I have locked fps I still get plenty good performance on 60 fps.
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The high bitrates dont really matter unless your pc is very, VERY low on sources, I myself tried Fraps on a dell inspiron that was like 5 years old when I tried it and i got a very good video and my game didn't lag and it had specs and was slow as and I was recording to the same hard drive and the video was fine along with the performance, my current laptop has an intel HD graphics 3000 with 64 mbs of dedicated video memory and according to Dxtory I have about 60 mbs of write speed(when not laggy) and 40 write(when an hour has passed) speed which is more than PLENTY to support Fraps bitrates.
First of all, what do you mean by "mbs"?
Secondly, you're not mentioning recording resolution at all. What resolution were you recording at on this system? Much of the validity about bitrates depends on this.
Also heres a comparison of bitrates(I didn't include these because theres no real point as most people nowadays have a pc with at least 20 mbs of write speed which is good enough to support any of these softwares except for Dxtory which I now found out mostly needs a fast hard drive to run and not lag
No. At any decent resolution (i.e., 720p and above), 20 "mbs" (assuming you mean MB/s) is not enough for recording with FRAPS. If you can provide some benchmarks or sample files showing it is, I'll gladly concede. The fact is, though, that recording at 1280x720 at 30fps with FRAPS requires on average 26MB/s sustained write speed. 1080p at 30fps requires about 60MB/s sustained write.
Take a look at this image, for instance:
Convert that bitrate from kilobits per second to kilobytes per second, then tell me if your 20 "mbs" is enough.
and Fraps,action and bandicam dont really need fast hard drives to play without lag as Fraps is processor dependent which only takes 10% to run, action is gpu dependent which still takes a lot less than the game your recording, bandicam is dependent on BOTH cpu and gpu and requires very powerful ones at that none of them but Dxtory is Hard drive dependent)
Again, at decent resolutions, FRAPS is more HDD-intensive than it is CPU-intensive.
also no Bandicam which compresses the video file is NOT a good trade off as to get ANY good performance you need an EXTREAMLY beefy PC otherwise youl just get ty framerates.
Yes, Bandicam, and any other software that performs significant compression while recording will perform worse than something like FRAPS or Action! which perform relatively little. The point is very valid, however, that if you have too slow a disc to record high bitrate files to, yet have the computing power to encode on the fly, that will be your better option.
Results from my previously mentioned video test a long time ago:
Quote from "Snippet from the description" »
All of the clips used in this video are exactly 3 minutes long, and recorded at 1920x1080 at 30fps. I compiled a "table" of the file sizes produced by each program.
All of the clips used in this video are exactly 3 minutes long, and recorded at 1920x1080 at 30fps. I compiled a "table" of the file sizes produced by each program.
(NOTE: yes I meant MB/s) Did you copy that from this : ? cuz it looks the same to me.
but anyways, most people anyways still dont even record minecraft at 1280x720, skydoesminecraft uses dxtory and he records at 854x480 resolution and then just encodes it into 1280x720, and still who do you think has a pc that has only 20- MB/s write speed?
The thing I do is record minecraft with Fraps in 854x480 and then upscale it to 1920x1080 and its minecraft, whos gonna notice? Other games I record them at 1280x720 then upscale to 1080p which is slightly higher which results in minimal quality loss.
Also at "decent resolutions" you can have 720p from 2564x1440 res by just using the Half-size feature in Fraps which not only reduces the file size by a INCREDIBLE amount, it also halves the bitrate and how much KB/s or MB/s is being written(this method btw is used by both JeromeASF, TheBajanCanadian, Yogscast and Ssundee(yogscast and ssundee have 1080p because they use twice the 1080p resolution and then use half size[ik that Ssundee uses Fraps, the yogscast use different recorders but everytime I see their mouse cursors their TINY, but I do know that Lewis and Duncan use Dxtory and can play at whatever res they want and just have Dxtory encode it into 1080p]) which is why when you see their mouse cursor in their videos its so small).
I can also play and record at 1280x720 if I wanted at 60fps so I dont need to worry about it, but for lowering bitrates then use your game at its default resolution(minecraft in this case goes at 854x480).
The only time to worry about bitrates with Fraps is when your recording with "Force Lossless RGB capture" which not only increases the file sizes extremely but it triples the bitrate which wouldn't happen if you could change the Fraps codec from Fps01 to another codec which supports lossless RGB without getting too big of a bitrate and still getting good performance, I use the UtVideo codec suite with Dxtory on its YUV420 setting which is the same quality and smaller files which still ends up with smaller bitrates and better performance, besides if anyone wants to record they still get a bigger hard drive to record to which still gets bigger write speeds(as I've just gotten now, I just got a 4tb HDD which according to Dxtory has a 122 MB/s write speed) and when they have a slow pc they know to use Fraps for the low amount of resources it takes, so they probably get a 1tb HDD which is still more than enough to not only house the Fraps files but has enough of a write speed to record to.
Still once again, who has a hard drive these days that has less that 20 MB/s write speed, i mean even company PCs still need to be fast enough to access data fast to be able to report to others, and ik for a fast that less than 20 MB/s is not enough speed to do that.
Even so, people who want to play at huge resolutions probably have a whole setup for recording, and to play games with a great gpu still requires a good write speed to access data fast, so for playing high quality games at high resolutions requires a good hard drive and gpu so people like Jeromeasf, ssundee and the yogscast have that already.
As for benchmarks, I will be happy to make a zip file benchmarking at 1280x720 and 854x480(Fraps glitches somehow and when on 854x480 it records at 848x480 which I think is cuz Fraps isn't optimized for recording at resolutions that are not EXACT multiples of the most commonly used aspect ratios[16:9 and 4:3] and 854 is if you multiplied 16 by 53.375 which goes into decimals which Fraps cant record at so I use adobe premiere to stretch the video when I'm getting stuff ready to extract for youtube). It will be on a mediafire link for ease of use.
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Ohhhhhhh nvm Hi NalaNosivad How did you find this page? lol
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I do think if you're recording at below 1280x720, you should always upscale the vertical resolution to 720 minimum, since I believe that's what triggers YouTube to enable the video to be played back in HD. Otherwise, you're stuck with 480p. Which is poop.
Take for example a game I recorded a little while back: How Mosquito Became Human. That thing runs at a resolution at 576x384. That upscales nicely to 1080x720, which is an odd resolution, but the quality of the final video was all the better for YouTube treating it as HD.
Those benchmarks certainly seem fine! If you look at the second source here (http://web.archive.org/web/20121019170139/http://frapsforum.com/threads/variance-in-bitrate-between-game-titles-while-recording-with-fraps-why-it-matters.1302/), you'll see the first source seems to be overstating bitrates a little bit.. that's my bad! Minecraft at 1080p with FRAPS seems to hover around 26.25MB/s, so 720p would be significantly lower. That same source though does show that the more visually complex a game, the higher the bitrate required, which seems logical. You are indeed correct though that most people will have a HDD fast enough to record maybe 720p with FRAPS, unless it's a ridiculously slow "green" 5200rpm monstrosity.
Action, while it's certainly the buggiest out of the lot that I've encountered, is just too well-performing for me to give up. Until I get a faster HDD (the one I use is several years old now, and showing its age), I'll keep using it. It lets me with no issues, so it's definitely the best performance-wise in my mind.
Ohhhhhhh nvm Hi NalaNosivad How did you find this page? lol
Ha, hey. I just saw it on the forums! I've actually been thinking of doing a more thorough comparison video with more software, since I messed up the audio in that one so badly.
The part about ssundee and yogscast they use 3840x2160 and have Fraps(ssundee uses Fraps, the yogscast use Fraps too but I dont know which ones, but ik that lewis uses Dxtory) on 50%/half size which encodes it into a perfect 1080p.
yes your right that the HD resolutions on youtube are determined by the height of the resolution so anything can be 720p "HD" as long as its got a height of 720 pixels, also in the benchmarks I did use the resolutions at what I said in the zip file, I had them at 1280x720 and 854x480, but I've fixed Dxtory so now I can record minecraft with Dxtory on 60fps locked(which is a shame cuz I rather not but unless i have sync video fps and limit video fps on i get around 40-50 but with those on i get 60), the thing I do is have minecraft running with optifine, at 720p and have it on half size so I get 640x360(pretty low but minecraft looks pretty much the same when upscaled) then upscale it to 1080p which gets the great quality. JeromeASF and TheBajanCanadian run minecraft in 2560x1440 and have their fraps at half size, ik they use Fraps cuz Jerome mentioned in one of their videos "I dont get whats wrong with Fraps, it just records stuff so dark for you guys", this is the darkness glitch in Fraps which I saw in both of their perspectives in that video so I'm just assuming that Bajan/Mitch uses Fraps too but im sure he uses it, also I see the darkness glitch with ssundee's videos too so I also assume he uses fraps.
plus I upscale my videos to 1440x1080(with the aspect ratio on 1.3333 on adobe premiere which makes 1440x1080 widescreen which is the same as 1920x1080 on square pixels aspect ratio) so my videos get 1080p.
Action is yes a good recorder when it works properly but I still prefer Dxtory because its full proof with no glitches whatsoever, but the problems I've been having are that it wont encode into 1080p unless the game is fullscreened which means I cant use audacity to record my mic and action fuses the audio files so I can't edit out the background noise in my noisy-ass mic, having it "record mic into a separate track" makes it not record any audio at all.
But I think now that it depends on the complexity of the game for the bitrates to still vary, minecraft is probably the least complex so the bitrates are fine for recording 720p, still to lower file size and bitrate, just record 720p at half size then just upscale it to 720p or 1080p cuz its MINECRAFT, whos gonna notice any res upscale, it looks nearly the same from most resolutions, sure 1080p+ does get slightly better looking footage but still upscaling gets the job done anyway so I dont bother for that and this reason: my laptops monitor only supports 1600x900 resolution so I literally cant record at anything higher than 720p without performance loss, i seriously get worse performance when playing fullscreened on 1600x900 then on 1280x720 windowed, im still thinking of getting a better pc with 2 monitors, one to have on 1280x720(or something higher) for recording games fullscreen and the other for my other programs(audacity, skype, hamachi, etc) so I can get best performance, also this way any notifications I get wont get in front of my screen and pause my game.
Also theres a problem I'm having with dxtory, i can record with it yes, but when i try to open the footage from Dxtory video codec it crashes the media player and adobe premiere/sony vegas when I try to import it, any ideas why? Dxtory video codec works fine for my cousin, also I'm currently using the lagarith lossless codec to record with dxtory which is working fine for now but I still prefer the Dxtory video codec for minecraft cuz its working now(I downgraded to a slightly lower version of Dxtory which fixed the Dxtory video codec problem on my pc and made it stop crashing my minecraft on recording start).
Btw its nice to talk to you Nala
Also I've noticed some weird stuff happening which certain games I try to record, they look like normal games at 1280x720 but then when I try to record them I get lag from even fraps, then I check the video file and somehow the video file is HUGE, even with Bandicam this happen on some games, also somehow Bandicam works on certain games in my pc but I still prefer the others, but I think I gotta re-install it cuz for some reason now I'm getting big files with it and not any better performance, i think it glitched and turned off compression all together. One of the games im talking about is this game called "Wizard 101" which is pretty cool but on pretty high graphics options somehow It increases the file size, I assumed that it was the resolution of the game that determined the file size and not many of the in-game graphics, this seems weird even for me because how does in-game graphics give more file size? I mean recorders just take like 30/60 screenshots every second so its just basically images.
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All you are doing is copying information from the internet and plastering it on the forum, You didn't explain any of the programs from your own perspective/experience.
It's disgusting. Go and learn more about these programs and come back.
All you are doing is copying information from the internet and plastering it on the forum, You didn't explain any of the programs from your own perspective/experience.
It's disgusting. Go and learn more about these programs and come back.
I do know about these programs, I've taken tons of info from the internet and from my experience and put it up here.
For example, bandicam is not one that I would recommend because it for one doesnt have as much quality as the others and it also most of the time locks your(most of the time with me) in-game framerate even if it has locking framerate off.
Action is good but I've had too many broken video files with it for my liking.
Fraps is good too but it still has glitches that I don't like having but its been working fine for me lately after I reformatted and reinstalled windows.
Dxtory I would 10/10 recommend to ANYONE with a mid-high end pc, its has no glitches like the color glitch that I MYSELF have seen with fraps and bandicam, it doesnt glitch and not record audio which I've gotten with all 3 of the others sometimes, it leaves your game framerate alone which results in perfect performance(this doesnt work on my pc cuz it sucks, but I've also tested these softwares on my cousin's pc which is a mid-end pc and he gets way better performance than any of these recorders[especially bandicam]), it can live stream a lot easier than action and using dxtory to stream allows a person to add facecam into the stream.
So in MY opinion Dxtory is the best for mid-high end pcs, Fraps for low end pcs with a lot of HDD space, Bandicam for EXTREMELY HIGH END pcs with small hard drives, Action for people who want very high quality video on low-end pcs with low HDD space but because of all its bugs I still prefer even Bandicam to Action, but ofc when Action works, its right up there next to Dxtory with performance and everything.Also most of the info I've put up there is from MY experience anyway
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I made this thread FROM my knowledge of these programs, I just added in some extra info from the net, but I truly have tested EACH of these softwares MULTIPLE times until I got it just right, I currently use Fraps for recording but I prefer Dxtory as its full-proof.
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(the numbers relate to the order I'm putting them in, not the rank of how good they are)
1.Fraps:
Video quality: Video quality from videos recorded with Fraps get amazing quality as Fraps uses a video codec called “Fps01” which is one of the best codecs out theres for quality, although its not THE worst but it very bad for video compression, the Fps01 codec uses a color space called “Lossless RGB” which is a lossless color space, when a codec is lossless it menas that it records EXACTLY the same colors and quality of the game/program your recording which results in bigger file sizes on the recorded video file but results in higher quality video.
Performance: What makes lossless so good is that if you have the hard drive space for it then using it to get great quality also results in better performance as(now to explain this next part, screen recorders record how many “fps” you set them to record, now what fps means is “Frames Per Second” which is how many “Frames/images” of your game that your seeing, most monitors only go up to 60 hertz which results in the user only seeing 60 fps, others can go up to 75 which results in the user seeing 75 fps, and some go up to even 144 hertz which gives the user the most smooth looking gameplay, so fps means how many frames that the recorder records at, so screen recorders are basically just programs that take extremely large amounts of images every second) it doesn't take the time and power from your PC to try and compress the images/Frames that it takes without losing quality(since most other recorders will use a different codec[that you sometimes can't change] that takes more time to compress the images to get smaller files but results in worse performance), although there are some exceptions to the rule that “Lossless RGB codecs are the fastest” as there are certain recorders that have changeable codecs that still get bad performance and also have huge files, from what I've seen, the Fps01 Fraps codec is not the best codec for compression but is the best codec for performance as it takes the least amount of cpu/gpu power to run, from my tests when I'm recording with Fraps(I used the task manager in windows 7 to see my cpu usage anf how much it would go up) I only get a 10% jump in cpu usage which leaves the rest for the game/program your recording to use. Another thing to mention about Fraps is how it handles the gameplay performance, the highest recording setting you can set Fraps to is 120fps(which is not really needed in most cases as 60 fps is perfect smoothness for not only video footage but also gameplay), now we know from what I explained before that the Fps01 codec is the best codec for performance but Fraps in itself chooses what framerate(how much fps your getting in-game) the game your recording should be running at to make sure that the framerate of the recorded video footage isn't unstable(what I mean by unstable is that sometimes recorders will have “framedrops” which are when the framerate of the game your recording or the resulting video drops to a certain point), I technically found out about the fact that Fraps chooses the video framerate yesterday(March 6th 2014) when I started recording a video for youtube(now I normally record at 60 fps in Fraps to get the best smoothness with my video footage and better game smoothness) and when recording Fraps will lock your game's framerate to what it says is good(which I thought to be locking your game framerate to what your recording fps is[recording at 60 fps then my game is locked at 60 fps and 30 fps is locked at 30 fps]) but when I checked the video footage later(I'm in Windows 7 so it shows the framerate of the video and resolution of the video file in the bottom of the windows explorer window when I click on a video file) it showed that it was 30 fps while when I was recording(now normally in big worlds in Minecraft[at the time of the recording I was in Minecraft] my fps is locked at what I specified but I was in a generated “Flat” world so I could test out little contraptions without lag) I was getting 60 fps, I'm recording with 30 fps for now until I get my new hard drive.
Audio Quality: Fraps has the option to record both your microphone and system audio(this means that it will record what is coming out of your speakers/headphones which results in recording your system and game sounds at the same time which means that you can have Fraps record your game audio, system audio and skype call at the same time), which I don't do most of the time as Fraps fuses the two audio sources into one audio track which makes it impossible to edit the audio without screwing up the game sounds(I have made the mistake of trying to do this with the audio fused and ended up with very terrible screwed up game sounds), I have also found that I do not like having Fraps to record my mic audio because not only is that reason above a reason not to do it but also Fraps doesn't really balance the mic and game audio volume levels very good so it ends up with you needing to be right next to the mic to be able to get your mic audio above the game audio, but most people like me who use Fraps(or any of the softwares I'm mentioning in this essay) use a separate program for recording microphone audio(I myself use a program called audacity[now that it stopped screwing up the microphone audio]) so they can change the volume of the game audio and microphone audio as they become two different tracks so people who watch the video can still hear your voice while also hearing the game audio(I make sure that I can hear both perfectly and theres no distortion or any of that stuff).
Resulting video playback performance: It really depends mostly on the media player its playing back in, but sometimes it really is the footage, I've had no problems playing back Fraps footage, the reason I'm including this part is that the Fraps video and audio both have extremely high bitrates and sometimes a media player may not be able to handle the high bitrates of Fraps files and play it back very slowly and laggy, I've got a little machine which handle most of my stuff fine and playing back the Fraps files in Windows media player is fine, the only problem with using Windows media player is that it crushes the white and blacks in the recorded video file which ends up making the video look significantly darker, but I don't usually watch my footage that way, I usually just watch the footage as I edit it in Sony Vegas Pro 12.0 and Sony Vegas previews the video without the crushed whites and blacks. Overall playing back the footage is perfectly fine unless you have an extremely low-end PC which was meant for stuff like word processing more than anything, although when you edit your video and render it into .mp4 or .wmv you can choose the bitrate of the video file(only in .wmv) which is default set to 8m which is perfect for most(99.99%) PC's.
2.Bandicam
Video quality: Its video quality is comparable to Fraps and Dxtory quality as its default setting is on a codec called “Motion JPEG” which has a quality drop-down menu which goes from 10-100 and is default set to 80% quality which is fine as 80+ quality is no different and only increase file size, but Motion JPEG is not a lossless RGB codec therefore setting it quality to 100 will still end up with lower quality then Fraps and Dxtory, although Bandicam comes with extra codecs when its installed which are installed with the product itself, you can change the codec of bandicam to any of these codecs(it also has an external codec option which allows you to use other codecs that you have installed on your system[fron the internet or already installed], but the problem with the external codec part of bandicam is that that option only supports 32-bit systems which has a VERY small number of exceptions[I've found some external codecs which work with Bandicam on my 64-bit system]), it installs these codecs when you install Bandicam: H.264(Intel{R} Quick Sync video), Xvid, MPEG-1, Motion JPEG, YV12, and RGB24. These codecs are all good except for YV12 and RGB24 as YV12 does good quality it is half lossless which results in not very good performance and big files, RGB24 is to me and anyone else who uses Bandicam the worst lossless codec as it doesn't change the game to any better performance than it is with other codecs and because its a lossless codec which anyone would consider a 200% lossless codec as it tries to focus all of your PC's power toward getting Super HD quality, you may be thinking “Hmm this sounds good isn't it?” but no its not, RGB24 gets 1 gigabyte of file sizes every 10 seconds of footage which will mean a 20 minute video using the RGB24 codec will give you 20 gbs of file size and pretty bad performance as it takes more power to make the video better quality then to give the person the performance he would assume he would get. The MPEG-1 codec is a good codec for getting great quality with extremely tiny video files, the problem is that if you want to use it you have to buy and download the MPEG codec(you may also think “why is it an option if you have to buy this anyway?” thats because the codec works fine on its own but if you try to open it in a video editor or try to upload it to youtube then in the video editor it will say it can't find a codec to open the video file with and youtube does not accept .avi files which is what MOST screen recorders output the video to be), H.264 Intel quick sync is a pretty good codec but its not a full proof video codec as half the time it will produces a broken, un-editable and unusable video file which will be about 5kbs of file size when its broken, but on the times that it works it gives off great quality and very small files which you don't need to buy a codec to use, although these sound like good codecs the best one to go with is the default Motion JPEG codec which puts out very good quality(if its quality is set to 80 or higher) and very small and editable files and is a full proof codec for use with BANDICAM ONLY as trying to set theses codecs in Dxtory or other programs will cause problems(this also applies to the FP01 Fraps codec), setting the Fraps or Motion JPEG codecs in Dxtory doesn't have technical problems but it can't start recording using these codecs(in Dxtory it has a phase it must go through before it starts recording, when you press your start recording hotkey Dxtory will start a “init/initiation” process which enables the codec then starts recording if it can enable the codec, if it can't then when you start your recording, Dxtory will show in it's framerate counter the little “init” text sideways and will stay that way if you try to set it to the Fraps or Motion JPEG codecs[they show up as two things in the codec selection menu for Dxtory, Fraps shows up as: “Fraps video decompressor” and Bandicam/Motion JPEG shows up as: “Bandi MPEG-1 Video Decoder{this is technically for MPEG-1 and not Motion JPEG but MPEG-1 and Motion JPEG use the same video recording and compressing technology/software so I consider them the same}”]).
Audio Quality: There are only 2 audio codecs that you can use with Bandicam, “MPEG-1 L2” and the lossless and perfect quality audio codec “PCM”, it doesn't really matter which one you choose as they both get basically the same audio file size, but I don't really rely on the MPEG codecs or other stuff installed with Bandicam as much as the other stuff, and I personally like the quality of the PCM codec more than the MPEG-1 L2 one as I know that the PCM codec is full proof and will not screw up. Another thing to mention is that Bandicam has a feature which fuses the audio files but disabling that will have your microphone and game/system audio split(the game and system audio will be fused) into two different tracks which allows you to change the volume of the audio in your editor but most people still use an external program to record microphone audio(like me).
Performance: In Fraps a lot of the time the games I record with it get good performance depending on the fps I have it recording at(I don't consider 30 fps as bad performance) but in Bandicam's case it depends mostly on the game for performance, Bandicam is supposed to leave your game framerate alone and record at what you set but from my tests(and others) most(99.98%) games will get locked framerate from Bandicam and tons of framedrops, VERY rarely does Bandicam not lock your framerate in a game, and on their website they say that Bandicam ”uses the least amount of power and is perfect for low-end PCs” this is a lie as on low end PCs most games you will try to record with Bandicam will get you a HUGE framerate drop on any settings, I have tried out Bandicam on a lot of games and most of them got terrible performance, in Minecraft I got 8-10 fps with Bandicam and got me a 90% cpu usage jump, recording my desktop gets me an 80% jump, when it finds a game it can record without lagging and locking your framerate it ends up only giving a 30 % cpu usage jump(they also claim that it uses the least amount of cpu power to run which Fraps uses the least amount of it{with Fraps in most of my games I get a 10% jump in cpu usage}). But then again it vaires from game to game for this type of performance, but most of my games that don't lag with Bandicam still gets me 30% cpu usage jump.
Resulting video playback performance: Videos in Bandicam don't get as high of bitrates on the resulting files with Fraps and play back fine in most media players but Windows media player still crushes whites and blacks.
3.Mirillis Action!
Quality: Video quality of Action! is very good and matches Fraps video quality, it doesn't use a lossless codec but the codec it uses has a new thing added in which keeps the lossless visual quality and compresses the video file efficiently without losing quality or performance, its codec is a codec which will cause the same “init” problem in Dxtory which is a shame but still works good, its codec is a codec you can only get when you install Action! And cannot be gotten any other way, its codec is called the FICV codec which is maed by Mirillis themselves for use only with Action!.
Audio quality: Audio in Action! I assume is PCM for best quality, a problem with Action! Is that it fuses the audio tracks just like Fraps, it has an option to record the microphone audio into a different audio track but it has a glitch with this option because for some reason when enabling this option the video file ends up with no audio at all, which is why I use audacity for recoding my microphone and just have Action! Recording my system/game sounds. A slight fix that Mirillis made to it before knowing of this glitch is that sort of fixes it is that it has an “audio balance” slider in the options which the higher the mic audio is put the lower the game/system audio is put to fix this slightly but most of us have microphones which have background noise and wish to edit it out which is why most of us use an external program for recording mic audio.
Performance: This recorder has a function in it to leave your game fps alone and recording at what you specify which works on low end PCs as it also leaves the game fps alone on low end PCs. I had about a 30% jump in cpu usage when recording with Action!.
Resulting video playback performance: Perfect and no crushed whites or blacks, I should have mentioned this earlier in the essay that the higher the bitrate of the video file the more crashed the blacks and whites get which results in even darker playback on Windows media player(I don't know why Windows media player does this, I think this is a way to compensate for the high bitrate to play the video at full speed so it ignores the blacks and whites to go faster), Action! videos have a very small bitrate which allows it to play smoothly(without crushed blacks and whites) until the video file goes longer than 10 minutes at which point Windows media player crushes the blacks and whites again.
4.Dxtory:
Video quality:Excellent, on the codec that is installed when you install it, the video quality is unrivaled, it has 4 different quality settings, RGB – True Quality, YUV24 – High Quality, YUV420 – Medium Quality, and YUV410 – Low Quality, on YUV420 medium quality or higher there is no difference in quality, I use a different codec for recording with Dxtory called the UtVideo codec suite on the UtVideo YUV420 part for good quality, theres no difference in quality between the default Dxtory codec called the “Dxtory Video Codec” but when I installed Dxtory I don't know what happened but it didn't install the codec correctly and when I try to use the Dxtory video codec it crashes the game I'm trying to record.
Audio quality: Perfect as it uses the PCM codec by default for audio, it does not allow the user to have the audio fused so when recording and checking the audio later, the microphone audio and game/system audio is split into 2 separate tracks, another thing to note about Dxtory is that it has the compatibility up to 8 audio sources.
Performance + Resulting video playback performance: Dxtory performs poorly on low-end PCs but when your PC can fully support Dxtory, you get not only the best quality, but the best performance out of all of these recorders, it leaves your game fps alone, has no black screens in the recording(recording glitch), has no framedrops, footage has the lowest bitrate of these recorders as it doesn't have crushed blacks and whites in Windows media player, has an overall better quality than Fraps, Action! or Bandicam, has smaller video files than Fraps(they do still get pretty big but not like Fraps files type of big). As for cpu usage, it mostly depends on the game and how good your graphics card is, to run this in my opinion requires a 1.5gb graphics card to run without any performance hit, sure it requires a lot of power but its worth it for the best performance.
Overall in my opinion, Dxtory is the one to use as my cousin has a PC with a graphics card that has 1gb of video ram(1.5ghs is preferred but when your trying to record Minecraft with Dxtory on a PC with that much video ram theres no problems with performance) in which he gets 150 fps when not recording with Dxtory and still gets 150 fps while recording in Minecraft, which when he used Bandicam, like I said that most games get locked framerate with Bandicam, well Minecraft is one of them, when he wasn't recording while Bandicam is open he gets about 75 fps because for some reason Bandicam lags your game even while not recording-(people will think that he had fps limit on but no it wasn't on) and when he was recording(he records at 30 fps) he had his framerate locked at 30 with CONSTANT framedrops and he couldn't even reach 30 fps while recording with Bandicam, he was getting a constant 10-29 fps with constant changing fps with stability, I told him that I will just test out Dxtory on his system to see if it would run good, and when he saw how much better performance he was getting with Dxtory, he switched from Bandicam to Dxtory, which just goes to show you that Exkode really put a lot of effort to make Dxtory the best recording software out there, the only problem with Dxtory is how much power it takes to run, but when your PC supports it fully then its worth the 36$ that Dxtory costs.
Another thing I forgot to mention above is the complexity of each of the recording softwares:
Fraps: Its easy to use and is usually on a “Click to record” type of complexity as its not that hard to set up and can start recording automatically.
Bandicam: Its also pretty easy to set up but still has some more customization options than Fraps and is usually on a “Sets up in 5 minutes” type of complexity.
Mirillis Action!: Its a little more complex than Fraps but is still very easy to set up but still lacks some customization options that Bandicam has, its usually “Sets up in 1 minute” for most people who use it.
Dxtory: Very complex and for most beginners is a NIGHTMARE to set up but if your as good as me you can set it up pretty fast, what I mean is that I already tested many, MANY different video codecs and settings until I got it just right, its either “(Hard to set up for a beginner) OR (Easy to set up for a professional or someone who has experience with this sort of thing)”, but of course with complexity comes quality which is what I believe as Dxtory handles up to 8 inputs for audio, has a live-streaming feature, has different profiles for each program it detects(which allows the user to have different recording settings for each game which is very ingenious as some games behave differently depending on your settings).
A note to wrap up this is that I am a person who prefers complexity to ease of use most of the time and prefers bigger video files and better performance(Dxtory, Fraps) than to small files with terrible performance(Bandicam and sometimes Action! gives me lag on some games). I can post pictures of my settings for each of these programs if suggested, and I hope you enjoyed reading this.
Thank you.
https://www.youtube.com/zyad48
Can I make a thread where I talk about how amazing this photo is without any pictures of it?
How is this useless? I was just putting it out there so people who want to know what software to use, doing this allows them to make their own decision of what they want and helps them choose.
https://www.youtube.com/zyad48
Fraps is a very good choice as it takes little to no power at all to run and your game runs as smooth as butter on 98% PCs.
I'm glad I helped you :).
https://www.youtube.com/zyad48
You have zero kind of any evidence to support any of the claims you make. You don't even have filesize comparisons.
I said in the review that Fraps and dxtory take a lot of hard drive space, and that even though bandicam files are small the performance is awful, and even though that Action files are pretty small its not fullproof and may up the recording, either by not recording at all or just breaking the video file all together. also most people think that 1 minute in Fraps is 1gb which is 100% INCORRECT it takes a lot more than just saying that Fraps takes that much per minute, it requires checking the resolution of the game, I can record 20 minutes of minecraft on its normal resolution and get like 7gbs out of it -.-.
And I'm also going to make a comparison VIDEO of me trying out these softwares and comparing EVERYTHING, quality, file sizes, performance, complexity, which is better than this but I still wanted to get this out there
https://www.youtube.com/zyad48
Comparison videos, when concerning specific quality, are mostly moot aswell. Youtube just reencodes them either way.
If you were to at least mention the bitrate of the resulting videos with each program, under particular settings, or just mention the end result in filesize and the length, that'd be cool.
It'd be even better if you made little splices of the source video of each source and uploaded them so we could have a look, or use something like this if you know how to take a video of the same source material with each recording program, so we can at least see the difference in stills.
A section on how, if you have a faster hard drive dedicated to recording, FRAPS could very easily be your best option with a resource-intensive game, but if you have a slower, or only one drive, another recorder that compresses the video more may be a good trade-off with a less resource intensive game.
It's all about balancing HDD write speed and encoding-on-the-fly CPU usage.
I actually did a video comparing FRAPS, Dxtory and Action myself (with horrible audio, due to a few screwups on my part) that I could PM you for a comparison, if you like?
The high bitrates dont really matter unless your pc is very, VERY low on sources, I myself tried Fraps on a dell inspiron that was like 5 years old when I tried it and i got a very good video and my game didn't lag and it had specs and was slow as and I was recording to the same hard drive and the video was fine along with the performance, my current laptop has an intel HD graphics 3000 with 64 mbs of dedicated video memory and according to Dxtory I have about 60 mbs of write speed(when not laggy) and 40 write(when an hour has passed) speed which is more than PLENTY to support Fraps bitrates. also what do you mean by "I actually did a video comparing FRAPS, Dxtory and Action myself (with horrible audio, due to a few screwups on my part) that I could PM you for a comparison, if you like? " sure I would like to but to compare what?
Also heres a comparison of bitrates(I didn't include these because theres no real point as most people nowadays have a pc with at least 20 mbs of write speed which is good enough to support any of these softwares except for Dxtory which I now found out mostly needs a fast hard drive to run and not lag and Fraps,action and bandicam dont really need fast hard drives to play without lag as Fraps is processor dependent which only takes 10% to run, action is gpu dependent which still takes a lot less than the game your recording, bandicam is dependent on BOTH cpu and gpu and requires very powerful ones at that none of them but Dxtory is Hard drive dependent)
Fraps - Huge bitrates.
Action! - Bitrates pretty small but get bigger over time but are less HDD stressful as they only get huge after about 10 minutes of recording.
Dxtory - Big bitrates but smaller than Fraps.
Bandicam - tiny bitrates.
also no Bandicam which compresses the video file is NOT a good trade off as to get ANY good performance you need an EXTREAMLY beefy PC otherwise youl just get ty framerates.
https://www.youtube.com/zyad48
I prefer action too but the problem with it is that its not fullproof, a lot of the time now it either doesnt record when I try or it breaks the video file. None of them are actually full proof except for Dxtory, Exkode really put work into making Dxtory fullproof(no color glitch like Fraps that happen sometimes, no audio glitch where it doesnt record audio which happens with Bandicam, Fraps and action, theres no broken video files, framedrops, black screens, etc which is what I prefer as I'm one who would prefers bigger file sizes with great quality and performance then small files with bad performance or broken files) and another thing action still takes a little too much power to run sometimes and gets me bad performance which with Fraps even though I have locked fps I still get plenty good performance on 60 fps.
https://www.youtube.com/zyad48
First of all, what do you mean by "mbs"?
Secondly, you're not mentioning recording resolution at all. What resolution were you recording at on this system? Much of the validity about bitrates depends on this.
No. At any decent resolution (i.e., 720p and above), 20 "mbs" (assuming you mean MB/s) is not enough for recording with FRAPS. If you can provide some benchmarks or sample files showing it is, I'll gladly concede. The fact is, though, that recording at 1280x720 at 30fps with FRAPS requires on average 26MB/s sustained write speed. 1080p at 30fps requires about 60MB/s sustained write.
Take a look at this image, for instance:
Convert that bitrate from kilobits per second to kilobytes per second, then tell me if your 20 "mbs" is enough.
Again, at decent resolutions, FRAPS is more HDD-intensive than it is CPU-intensive.
Yes, Bandicam, and any other software that performs significant compression while recording will perform worse than something like FRAPS or Action! which perform relatively little. The point is very valid, however, that if you have too slow a disc to record high bitrate files to, yet have the computing power to encode on the fly, that will be your better option.
Source for FRAPS bitrates:
https://frapsforum.com/threads/best-fraps-performance-tips-afaik.559/#post-2196
http://web.archive.org/web/20121019170139/http://frapsforum.com/threads/variance-in-bitrate-between-game-titles-while-recording-with-fraps-why-it-matters.1302/
Results from my previously mentioned video test a long time ago:
(NOTE: yes I meant MB/s)
Did you copy that from this : ? cuz it looks the same to me.
but anyways, most people anyways still dont even record minecraft at 1280x720, skydoesminecraft uses dxtory and he records at 854x480 resolution and then just encodes it into 1280x720, and still who do you think has a pc that has only 20- MB/s write speed?
The thing I do is record minecraft with Fraps in 854x480 and then upscale it to 1920x1080 and its minecraft, whos gonna notice? Other games I record them at 1280x720 then upscale to 1080p which is slightly higher which results in minimal quality loss.
Also at "decent resolutions" you can have 720p from 2564x1440 res by just using the Half-size feature in Fraps which not only reduces the file size by a INCREDIBLE amount, it also halves the bitrate and how much KB/s or MB/s is being written(this method btw is used by both JeromeASF, TheBajanCanadian, Yogscast and Ssundee(yogscast and ssundee have 1080p because they use twice the 1080p resolution and then use half size[ik that Ssundee uses Fraps, the yogscast use different recorders but everytime I see their mouse cursors their TINY, but I do know that Lewis and Duncan use Dxtory and can play at whatever res they want and just have Dxtory encode it into 1080p]) which is why when you see their mouse cursor in their videos its so small).
I can also play and record at 1280x720 if I wanted at 60fps so I dont need to worry about it, but for lowering bitrates then use your game at its default resolution(minecraft in this case goes at 854x480).
The only time to worry about bitrates with Fraps is when your recording with "Force Lossless RGB capture" which not only increases the file sizes extremely but it triples the bitrate which wouldn't happen if you could change the Fraps codec from Fps01 to another codec which supports lossless RGB without getting too big of a bitrate and still getting good performance, I use the UtVideo codec suite with Dxtory on its YUV420 setting which is the same quality and smaller files which still ends up with smaller bitrates and better performance, besides if anyone wants to record they still get a bigger hard drive to record to which still gets bigger write speeds(as I've just gotten now, I just got a 4tb HDD which according to Dxtory has a 122 MB/s write speed) and when they have a slow pc they know to use Fraps for the low amount of resources it takes, so they probably get a 1tb HDD which is still more than enough to not only house the Fraps files but has enough of a write speed to record to.
Still once again, who has a hard drive these days that has less that 20 MB/s write speed, i mean even company PCs still need to be fast enough to access data fast to be able to report to others, and ik for a fast that less than 20 MB/s is not enough speed to do that.
Even so, people who want to play at huge resolutions probably have a whole setup for recording, and to play games with a great gpu still requires a good write speed to access data fast, so for playing high quality games at high resolutions requires a good hard drive and gpu so people like Jeromeasf, ssundee and the yogscast have that already.
As for benchmarks, I will be happy to make a zip file benchmarking at 1280x720 and 854x480(Fraps glitches somehow and when on 854x480 it records at 848x480 which I think is cuz Fraps isn't optimized for recording at resolutions that are not EXACT multiples of the most commonly used aspect ratios[16:9 and 4:3] and 854 is if you multiplied 16 by 53.375 which goes into decimals which Fraps cant record at so I use adobe premiere to stretch the video when I'm getting stuff ready to extract for youtube). It will be on a mediafire link for ease of use.
https://www.youtube.com/zyad48
https://www.youtube.com/zyad48
https://www.youtube.com/zyad48
Take for example a game I recorded a little while back: How Mosquito Became Human. That thing runs at a resolution at 576x384. That upscales nicely to 1080x720, which is an odd resolution, but the quality of the final video was all the better for YouTube treating it as HD.
Those benchmarks certainly seem fine! If you look at the second source here (http://web.archive.org/web/20121019170139/http://frapsforum.com/threads/variance-in-bitrate-between-game-titles-while-recording-with-fraps-why-it-matters.1302/), you'll see the first source seems to be overstating bitrates a little bit.. that's my bad! Minecraft at 1080p with FRAPS seems to hover around 26.25MB/s, so 720p would be significantly lower. That same source though does show that the more visually complex a game, the higher the bitrate required, which seems logical. You are indeed correct though that most people will have a HDD fast enough to record maybe 720p with FRAPS, unless it's a ridiculously slow "green" 5200rpm monstrosity.
Action, while it's certainly the buggiest out of the lot that I've encountered, is just too well-performing for me to give up. Until I get a faster HDD (the one I use is several years old now, and showing its age), I'll keep using it. It lets me with no issues, so it's definitely the best performance-wise in my mind.
Just to clarify here, you mean 2560x1440?
Ha, hey. I just saw it on the forums! I've actually been thinking of doing a more thorough comparison video with more software, since I messed up the audio in that one so badly.
yes your right that the HD resolutions on youtube are determined by the height of the resolution so anything can be 720p "HD" as long as its got a height of 720 pixels, also in the benchmarks I did use the resolutions at what I said in the zip file, I had them at 1280x720 and 854x480, but I've fixed Dxtory so now I can record minecraft with Dxtory on 60fps locked(which is a shame cuz I rather not but unless i have sync video fps and limit video fps on i get around 40-50 but with those on i get 60), the thing I do is have minecraft running with optifine, at 720p and have it on half size so I get 640x360(pretty low but minecraft looks pretty much the same when upscaled) then upscale it to 1080p which gets the great quality. JeromeASF and TheBajanCanadian run minecraft in 2560x1440 and have their fraps at half size, ik they use Fraps cuz Jerome mentioned in one of their videos "I dont get whats wrong with Fraps, it just records stuff so dark for you guys", this is the darkness glitch in Fraps which I saw in both of their perspectives in that video so I'm just assuming that Bajan/Mitch uses Fraps too but im sure he uses it, also I see the darkness glitch with ssundee's videos too so I also assume he uses fraps.
plus I upscale my videos to 1440x1080(with the aspect ratio on 1.3333 on adobe premiere which makes 1440x1080 widescreen which is the same as 1920x1080 on square pixels aspect ratio) so my videos get 1080p.
Action is yes a good recorder when it works properly but I still prefer Dxtory because its full proof with no glitches whatsoever, but the problems I've been having are that it wont encode into 1080p unless the game is fullscreened which means I cant use audacity to record my mic and action fuses the audio files so I can't edit out the background noise in my noisy-ass mic, having it "record mic into a separate track" makes it not record any audio at all.
But I think now that it depends on the complexity of the game for the bitrates to still vary, minecraft is probably the least complex so the bitrates are fine for recording 720p, still to lower file size and bitrate, just record 720p at half size then just upscale it to 720p or 1080p cuz its MINECRAFT, whos gonna notice any res upscale, it looks nearly the same from most resolutions, sure 1080p+ does get slightly better looking footage but still upscaling gets the job done anyway so I dont bother for that and this reason: my laptops monitor only supports 1600x900 resolution so I literally cant record at anything higher than 720p without performance loss, i seriously get worse performance when playing fullscreened on 1600x900 then on 1280x720 windowed, im still thinking of getting a better pc with 2 monitors, one to have on 1280x720(or something higher) for recording games fullscreen and the other for my other programs(audacity, skype, hamachi, etc) so I can get best performance, also this way any notifications I get wont get in front of my screen and pause my game.
Also theres a problem I'm having with dxtory, i can record with it yes, but when i try to open the footage from Dxtory video codec it crashes the media player and adobe premiere/sony vegas when I try to import it, any ideas why? Dxtory video codec works fine for my cousin, also I'm currently using the lagarith lossless codec to record with dxtory which is working fine for now but I still prefer the Dxtory video codec for minecraft cuz its working now(I downgraded to a slightly lower version of Dxtory which fixed the Dxtory video codec problem on my pc and made it stop crashing my minecraft on recording start).
Btw its nice to talk to you Nala
Also I've noticed some weird stuff happening which certain games I try to record, they look like normal games at 1280x720 but then when I try to record them I get lag from even fraps, then I check the video file and somehow the video file is HUGE, even with Bandicam this happen on some games, also somehow Bandicam works on certain games in my pc but I still prefer the others, but I think I gotta re-install it cuz for some reason now I'm getting big files with it and not any better performance, i think it glitched and turned off compression all together. One of the games im talking about is this game called "Wizard 101" which is pretty cool but on pretty high graphics options somehow It increases the file size, I assumed that it was the resolution of the game that determined the file size and not many of the in-game graphics, this seems weird even for me because how does in-game graphics give more file size? I mean recorders just take like 30/60 screenshots every second so its just basically images.
https://www.youtube.com/zyad48
zyad48
All you are doing is copying information from the internet and plastering it on the forum, You didn't explain any of the programs from your own perspective/experience.
It's disgusting. Go and learn more about these programs and come back.
I do know about these programs, I've taken tons of info from the internet and from my experience and put it up here.
For example, bandicam is not one that I would recommend because it for one doesnt have as much quality as the others and it also most of the time locks your(most of the time with me) in-game framerate even if it has locking framerate off.
Action is good but I've had too many broken video files with it for my liking.
Fraps is good too but it still has glitches that I don't like having but its been working fine for me lately after I reformatted and reinstalled windows.
Dxtory I would 10/10 recommend to ANYONE with a mid-high end pc, its has no glitches like the color glitch that I MYSELF have seen with fraps and bandicam, it doesnt glitch and not record audio which I've gotten with all 3 of the others sometimes, it leaves your game framerate alone which results in perfect performance(this doesnt work on my pc cuz it sucks, but I've also tested these softwares on my cousin's pc which is a mid-end pc and he gets way better performance than any of these recorders[especially bandicam]), it can live stream a lot easier than action and using dxtory to stream allows a person to add facecam into the stream.
So in MY opinion Dxtory is the best for mid-high end pcs, Fraps for low end pcs with a lot of HDD space, Bandicam for EXTREMELY HIGH END pcs with small hard drives, Action for people who want very high quality video on low-end pcs with low HDD space but because of all its bugs I still prefer even Bandicam to Action, but ofc when Action works, its right up there next to Dxtory with performance and everything.Also most of the info I've put up there is from MY experience anyway
https://www.youtube.com/zyad48
https://www.youtube.com/zyad48