Just recently I bought a new PC, nothing fancy just a mid range machine as befitted my financial situation, a friend of mine who lives thousands of miles away would like to build a similar machine so that he can play newer games such as The Witcher 2 or Battlefield 3.

I suggested to him that I record video of my gameplay and post it on YouTube so that he could see the performance a mid range machine would offer him in terms of graphical quality and frames per second, so I recently set about doing this but I’ve been having problems with the video.

Recorded video seems choppy even when gameplay isn’t and when I do get a reasonable video using Fraps or Xfire the YouTube video has tons of artefacts.

I have included an example video below so that you can see what I’m referring too.

I know i'm bad at the game but i really just wanted him to see the combat, I appreciate your input.

What are your system specs?

How smooth is said gameplay? 60FPS? It may seem choppy as FRAPS usually records at 30.

Get a better pc

As a good rule of thumb, it is generally accepted to reduce your graphics settings while recording.

@buft:

Gut response is disk i/o. A slow hard drive will only really impact game performance during loads as it has to read data off the drive and store it to incredibly fast ram.

Recording with fraps, constantly writing to your hard drive, and the higher resolution/larger the file, means your drive is working over time.

@Canteu: it records fine, when i watch the video back there aren't any problems recording its only once i put it on YouTube the problems appear.

@Vextroid said:

What are your system specs?

How smooth is said gameplay? 60FPS? It may seem choppy as FRAPS usually records at 30.

FX-6100 3.3ghz

Gskill 8gb DDR3 1333mhz RAM

XFX radeon HD 6770 1

Gigabyte M68MT-S2

fps is in the top corner of the video, 30- 50fps

First rule of Fraps: Never ever record fraps footage to the same disk that the game is running off, that will cause choppy footage.

@Zelyre: i have a feeling my hard drive is relatively slow, its one of the components i never really had a choice on when i bought the PC, the windows index rated it as the slowest component, giving it a score of 5.9, that could be it but as i mentioned to another poster, the recorded file is fine, artifacts only appear after the YouTube upload.

@Swoxx said:

First rule of Fraps: Never ever record fraps footage to the same disk that the game is running off, that will cause choppy footage.

only have one hard drive I'm afraid, maybe i need to look into that, thanks for the input

@buft: Ah, sorry. I was getting ready for work, read your post in haste, and pooped out some text.

Does your recorded video play fine locally? If so, I'm guessing that Youtube's reencoding is not playing nice with your video format.

Do you have Handbrake? If it plays fine locally, I'd try reencoding it as M4V H.264, then uploading the re-encoded video for Youtube to then reencode.

queue a "Yo Dawg" picture here.

http://handbrake.fr/downloads.php

You can also try out Dxtory instead of FRAPs, I feel like it performs a lot better and you have more control over how you record your footage since you can use custom codecs, instead of being locked into the FRAPs codec. You can also stream game footage to streaming sites and such.