Armagetron Video Capturing

[DDMJ]

I downloaded this neat program called SnapzProX which does a damn good job at video capturing my screen.

The only problem is that it's almost too good.

A 1:26 long video was 411.6 mb.

Anyways, here's my test video if you're interested:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9y775R0yLo&fmt=18

Also, I only got the trial period, so for the next 2 weeks I'll be offering to record gameplay and will be posting it on youtube.

However, the gameplay cannot be longer than 3 minutes since that will probably be over 1 GB and youtube doesn't allow files over 1 GB to be uploaded.

That is, unless I can find a good way to compress the videos while keeping the quality. I tried that once and this is what I got. The main problem is that it speed up the video immensely, but the good news is that the file got cut down to 7.4 mb.

So yea, check it out .

EDIT: Here's a direct link to the 7.4 mb version. It works perfectly fine if you download the file and play it on your computer, but for some reaons youtube doesn't like it.

[Jonathan]

If you want quick and good results you might try Theora directly from Snapz. Not sure if YouTube likes that codec, or it being encapsulated in .mov. You can also try H.264, Sorenson Video 3, or MPEG-4, or something more basic (keyframe-only codecs, which don't compress as well but tend to be fast) like Photo - JPEG or Apple Intermediate Codec (this one is proprietary to Apple - YouTube almost certainly won't like this). What also works well is first encoding to really high quality or lossless, and then transcoding using, say, VLC/x264, though that's tricky to set up correctly. I could give more details if you want.

It might also help to scale to YouTube-ish sizes (320x240 or 480x360 for high quality) in Snapz. Just watch out for ClearScale (note: the comparison here appears to compare to old non-CG scaling; CG is better) if it despises you as much as it despises me. I believe it uses CS by default for ≤50% or >100% scaling or so, and otherwise CG (which is great).