Need help with .avi files, FRAPS, and compression

[Darksky~]

Okay, there are a few things that are really starting to annoy me, and rather than make separate posts for each issue, I'm going to pack everything in one, so bear with me.

For reference, here are my specs:

Power supply - CORSAIR 450W
Processor - AMD Phenom II X4 945
Motherboard - MSI K9A2 CF-F
Video card - MSI Radeon HD 4890
RAM - OCZ Fatal1ty Edition 4GB DDR2 SDRAM
Hard drive - Seagate Barracuda 500GB

I built this computer about a month or two ago, so all the drivers are more or less up to date (including the MOBO Bios). I run Aion at 1920x1080 resolution.

My first issue is FRAPS. Even after spending a decent amount of money trying to build a mid-level "gaming" computer, I still deal with some lag when I run FRAPS. This really bothers me because I always wanted to make a PvP video and it seems like other players with similar specs don't run into the same problems. Sometimes I'm fine and run at about 50 FPS, and then other times I go down to about 15 FPS and Aion is unplayable. What do you recommend I do to fix this?

A few people told me that setting FRAPS to execute to another HDD separate from the one it is running on cuts down on lag significantly. However, I don't want to spend money buying a new HDD unless I know for certain that this is true. Does it really cut down on the lag, and by how much? Also, would an external HDD be suitable? (I really don't want to add another internal HDD.) Is there a way to connect my laptop to my desktop and have FRAPS write to my laptop like it would with another HDD? (This would save me cash since I already have a laptop.)

My next issue pertains to .avi files. Whenever I try to run my FRAPS .avi files, my screen goes black repeatedly and I get a message saying something like "a driver has stopped working and has recovered." This persists until I restart my computer. At first I thought it was just Windows Media Player, but I get the same problem when I drag the .avi files into VDUB and WMM. I tried running the files with VLC, and while my screen does not go black, the videos lag very badly. I've researched around and found other people having similar issues but I was unable to find a solution. What could be the problem? Remember: my drivers were updated about a month ago so that is unlikely the issue.

Finally, what is the best and quickest/easiest way to compress my .avi FRAPS files? I found a few tutorials, but they all seemed really complicated. I tried downloading a DVIX codec to compress with VDUB, but I get an error saying that the source image format is not acceptable.

[skyhawk]

Ppl that say that frapsing on a different HDD are correct. The .avi of fraps are huge depending on resolution/fps/music on-off. I haven't tried to fraps on a 10000rpm HDD but with the normal single internal HDD you will always have that problem with fraps except you gimp resolution etc, but then again I think you will fps lag again.

I was frapsing on wow/war at 1680x1050 at 50fps with sound off on a firewire(tried USB2 as well) HDD and on wow it was doable. On WaR the fps lag started showed up so I grabbed another internal 1GB HDD only for fraps and the problem solved.

Be aware that whatever you do on settings/HDDs YOU WILL fps lag abit when frapsing except you have a raid0 or a 2k+ euro PC. But frapsing on a separate internal HDD will help alot.

About the "slow motion" when you try to playback the frapsed avi its all about your HDD speed. Frapsed .avi files go from 1byte to 4GB(correct me if im wrong), then fraps makes another file till it gets to 4GB yada yada. I had problems with "slow motion" playback from my external firewire HDD, but when I copy the .avi to my internal one they play fine on windows media player. Same with the .avi that I fraps on my internal HDD. So Im sure its all about HDD speed. Try to defrag your HDD and see how it goes.

VLC/winamp doesnt like the bug .avi fies. I only playback them with windows media player and its working fine. No idea why you get that error never had that.

I render my frapsed .avi with sony vegas. I'm always using .wma format and it works fine. Just play with the settings(be sure to check audio settings as well) when you render the file.

P.S. My pc is similar as yours AM2+ 940 @ 3.6, K9A2 platinum , 4870x2, 8gigs DDR2.

Hope this helps gl.

[fishstix]

What are your fraps settings like? Even though it might seem unplayable, you should set the recording fps to 30 and it'd drop your game's fps to match. Unless you plan on uploading at that same resolution to a site which supports it, if you're only uploading to youtube, I would recommend lowering Aion's resolution to 1280x720 and set fraps to record at full-sized. This would still get you the HD option when you upload. Lowering or turning off AA completely would help too, not to mention tweaking other settings.

I'm not sure exactly why you wouldn't be able to play the raw .avi files, if it has a weird base framerate, I guess that could cause a problem in playback and converting. Skyhawk is right in that recording to a second hard drive would help to increase quality and stablize the fps. If you do buy a 2nd drive, I'd recommend this WD Caviar Black 500gb, 32mb cache for $50 after rebates. For simple cropping and converting, I use virtualdub and the divx codec. I started messing around with the h.264 codec for greater compression but havent made much progress.

[Darksky~]

Originally Posted by fishstix

What are your fraps settings like?

I've tried at fullsize and halfsize, 30 FPS and 50 FPS, and the lag seems similar either way. Sometimes it's fine, other times it spikes.

Unless you plan on uploading at that same resolution to a site which supports it, if you're only uploading to youtube, I would recommend lowering Aion's resolution to 1280x720 and set fraps to record at full-sized. This would still get you the HD option when you upload. Lowering or turning off AA completely would help too, not to mention tweaking other settings.

The only thing is, my monitor is recommended to run with a 1920x1080 resolution and I don't want to decrease my gaming experience just to run FRAPS. I'd imagine things would look worse on the smaller resolution.

I'm not sure exactly why you wouldn't be able to play the raw .avi files, if it has a weird base framerate, I guess that could cause a problem in playback and converting. Skyhawk is right in that recording to a second hard drive would help to increase quality and stablize the fps. If you do buy a 2nd drive, I'd recommend this WD Caviar Black 500gb, 32mb cache for $50 after rebates. For simple cropping and converting, I use virtualdub and the divx codec. I started messing around with the h.264 codec for greater compression but havent made much progress.

Would an external HDD work or is there a way to connect my laptop to my desktop and have my desktop write to my laptop? Like I said, I really would rather not buy another internal HDD since I don't want to mess with airflow and I'm unsure if I will be able to fit another SATA cable under my GPU (my MOBO is really funky).

Also, how exactly do you go about the compression process? I downloaded the divx codec but I get the error I mentioned in my original post.

As for my .avi files, it seems like a lot of people are having similar problems who have ATI or GTX GPUs.

[Iggy_Ride]

There's no harm in at least looking at it at a lower resolution.

As for your final uploads you'll need something to compress them, as Fraps saves in uncompressed .avi format. A good transcoder for you would be this, free, easy to use, etc. SUPER &copy

In all honesty you will more than likely need to lower at least some settings to run a recording program and aion at the same time. Try lowering something like shadows that takes up a lot of resources but isn't very noticeable in PVP and the abyss, especially during combat.

[fishstix]

Fraps worked perfectly fine on my GTX 260. The only thing I can imagine happening is that since your computer is so stressed trying to record at a high resolution, it's not recording correctly. Having a corrupt raw avi file would also create errors when trying to compress it.

To record, you have to compromise somewhere. If you want to play at a high resolution, record at half-sized, 30fps and lower some graphics settings like AA, shadows. If you want higher quality uploaded videos, record full-sized, 30fps, 1280x720 resolution.

There's no way that I know of to write onto a laptop unless you remove the laptop's harddrive itself and put it into an external dock. You could write it across a network but it'd be too slow I think. I'd only use an external hard drive as a last resort.

Well... actually one other option you can do, it's kinda thinking out of the box... If your video card has s-video out, or you buy some sort of video converter, you can try to clone your desktop and then input the video through a tv-tuner onto your laptop. This will be raw video from which you can record and not lose any performance since the recording program is on the laptop. I can try to explain this better if you need~