How can I record demos of my gameplay?

Question

I remember seeing a lot of cool Counter Strike videos back in the day. How do you go about recording your gameplay (any game) into an easy to edit format? Do you need special software? How much does it cost?

Answer 1

Fraps is the most popular tool for recording in game videos.

Fraps is a universal Windows application that can be used with games using DirectX or OpenGL graphic technology. In its current form Fraps performs many tasks and can best be described as:

Benchmarking Software - Show how many Frames Per Second (FPS) you are getting in a corner of your screen. Perform custom benchmarks and measure the frame rate between any two points. Save the statistics out to disk and use them for your own reviews and applications.

Screen Capture Software - Take a screenshot with the press of a key! There's no need to paste into a paint program every time you want a new shot. Your screen captures are automatically named and timestamped.

Realtime Video Capture Software - Have you ever wanted to record video while playing your favourite game? Come join the Machinima revolution! Throw away the VCR, forget about using a DV cam, game recording has never been this easy! Fraps can capture audio and video up to 2560x1600 with custom frame rates from 10 to 120 frames per second!

All movies are recorded in outstanding quality. If you have Windows Media Player please sample some of the movies captured with Fraps below:

Answer 2

TAKSI (open source; Windows only)

TAKSI: Video capture/Screen capture for 3D graphics

Taksi is a utility that allows you to take screenshots and record video clips of your favourite games and other 3D-graphics applications. Inspired by Fraps (www.fraps.com), Taksi aims to provide an open source alternative to that great tool.

Despite the webpage claims the latest stable release has been done in 2006, the project does not seem completely abandoned. Development version 0.7.7.9 has been released in July 2010.

Answer 3

Chris S probably gave what will become the most popular and accepted answer. Still, I think wegame.com (Windows only) should get a mention. It allows you to record nearly any game with their client and upload it to their site. It's also free. Unfotunately, I don't think you can do much in terms of editing the video.

Answer 4

Xfire - Gaming Simplified

Xfire is free, and in some ways it is better for recording games than other tools.

You can set a hotkey to quickly start recording the game that is currently active window. You are shown a small status bar inside the game with current length of the video and disk space it takes (the bar isn't shown in the video.)

Xfire can't do general screen recording, it is only for games. It records games in both fullscreen and windowed modes.

Result video is a high quality .avi file with resolution the same as the game window's client size, or half-size (depends on what you choose).

The bad thing about Xfire is that it not only does video records... Well, see for yourself at their website

For Windows only.

Answer 5

Dxtory (Windows only) is worth a mention as well.

It's 3,600 JPY (~US$40), but there is a free demo.

Dxtory is a movie capture tool only for DirextX/OpenGL application. In order to acquire data from Surface Memory directly, It operates very much at high speed. Arbitrary cropping and free scaling are supported by hardware.

Its main selling point is that it uses multiple hard drives for its operation, therefore avoiding the main bottleneck of video capture, which is recording speed*.

(*) I've tested this using 4 HDDs (all different), and the performance hit is noticeably lower than other similar software.

Answer 6

I made some tutorial back then when I was beginning recording my gameplay for my YouTube channel

• Fraps & VirtualDub: How to save disk space and enjoy good quality, small file size HD video clips
• VirtualDub 720p HD settings for YouTube! [Good quality, small file size]
• How to set up your computer for gameplay recording

Answer 7

While Fraps is the best solution for recording 3D-accelerated games and applications (and that includes 2D games that use your 3D videocard), it can't record your desktop or your browser.

For general-purpose desktop recording, I recommend CamStudio, which is free and open source. It can be used to record things that Fraps usually can't (for instance, in-browser games and some simple 2D games that don't use DirectX), as well as general game-related videos (e.g. tutorials, or a game launcher screen).

For simple video editing and conversion (for instance, before uploading to YouTube), I recommend VirtualDub, which is also free and open source.

Answer 8

VLC Media Player (open source, windows, linux & os x)
I have used VLC to record a video on windows. I have not tried this on linux or os x.

Launch the game of your choosing in windowed fullscreen mode.

Start up VLC.

On the "Media" menu select "Convert / Save..." (CTRL-R)

The "Open Media" dialog will appear, select the "Capture Device" tab

Change the capture mode to "Desktop".

Adjust the desired frame rate for capture, I set it to 30.00 f/s.

Click on the "Convert /Save" button.

The "Convert" dialog will appear.

Click the "Browse" button to find place to save the video and give it a name.

I use "capture.asf" as a filename

Select the profile you want to use. I have found that "Video WMV + WMA (ASF)" give the best results for me.

Press the "Start" button.

Activate the game and play for a bit, VLC will make a recording, when you want to stop recording activate VLC and press the stop button, then close it down.

The ASF format I use produces very large files, for a 2560 x 1600 display it takes about 1GB for 3 minutes of video. You can experiement with different encodings if you like but I had problems with the others so decided to use ASF, I imagine I can convert it to something smaller later.