Capture Game Video

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It looks like ZD Software released new 4.0 version of their screen recorder. As states on their web site, there are some improvements:

• New Friendly Software UI.
• Better Screen Capture Performance.
• More Screen Recording Options.
• Improved Program Compatibility.
• Unique Screen Sharing Feature.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any concrete news excepting new friendly UI and capture performance. We will do some tests with most known game video recorder tools a bit later, so we will be able to check how this new ZD Recorder is working now.

A few days ago Sytexis software released new version of theirgame video capture tool with new feature. The main change is ability to capture Direct Vista audio. Not all similar tools can do that. At least, Fraps can capture Vista Audio. Now PlayClaw can do it too.

Windows Vista have special audio engine and API. If software is not developed special for this audio engine, it will not be able to capture Vista audio excepting microphone input.

But, if software can use Vista CoreAudio engine, it can get advantage over other tool – user can use simultaneously two audio inputs. It’s very important in capturing videos while playing games. Player can speak in VoIP or Ventrilo/Teamspeak and at the same time capture game sound with video. In old Windows XP it was possible only with high-grade sound cards like SoundBlaster X-Fi.

It’s very frequent moment when player would like to record video footage from game. For example he want to show somebody how to play game cool or make some “frag-movie“.

There are a number of video capture tools for games. In common case these tools can capture videos not only from games but from any software which is using graphics library. The most popular graphics libraries are Microsoft DirectX and OpenGL.

Capturing game videos is not a trivial task. Capture tool must know how to “intercept” rendering. It is the first task for such tool. DirectX have a number of versions which are using a bit different methods to render 3D objects. At present time game developers are using DirectX version 8, version 9 and version 10. DirectX 10 can be used only with Windows Vista. But DirectX 8 and 9 can be used in 2000, XP, Vista, etc.

OpenGL library was used very frequently in past games but DirectX is taking leadership in present time.
But there are a number of old games which are very popular and based on OpenGL. So, modern game video capture tool must be able to process OpenGL render too.

At this moment the most popular game video capture tool is Fraps. But there are tools which have the same or better abilities in comparision with Fraps. For example Game Cam, ZD Game Recorder.

Recently on game video capture tools market was presented new tool with lots of features. It is PlayClaw tool – special tool for gamers.
Regardless of the fact that this is new tool, it have cool features and it’s working very stable. Read more about PlayClaw here –http://www.playclaw.com