Hey folks, I’m writing because I have a frustrating problem for which I could use some advice. I’m trying to record video of the DOS version of TIE Fighter for my blog. Now typically I’ve been using FRAPS, which so far hasn’t given me any problems. However, when I try to record video within TIE Fighter, the game slows to a freaking crawl. This happens at both 320 and 640 resolutions, and all sorts of different DOSBox setties have been tried to no avail.
I was therefore wondering if y’all knew of something I could try to fix this, or some other method of recording in-game video along with my voice, if possible. I need something simple since I’ve no experience with audio mixing or any of that nonsense. :/ If there’s also another program that might work to replace FRAPS in this instance, I’d be happy to hear that too.
Non-free: X-Split (in addition to producing in-game local recordings, it’s also built to stream to sites like Twitch.tv, Ustream, etc.), as the upgraded editions offer improved resolutions and audio codecs. Also integrates well with AverMedia capture cards and such if/when you get serious and setup a second PC to do the capture from the first.
Free: OBS, a recently popular alternative. IIRC, it’s getting close to feature parity, but has some stability issues.
Heck, it looks like newer versions of the cards I was thinking of even work on the local PC (although you’ll need a pretty beefy CPU to capture 1080p of high-end games, even with a capture card taking on some of the load).
Hey guys, many readers on the blog have spoken, and they want commentary! Wheee! So if the above programs don’t do the trick, what program can I use to merge my separate commentary track (likely recorded in Audacity) with the video captured from DOSBox?
Both XSplit and OBS should be able to capture any mic audio (in addition to system audio from games/software) and roll it into the overall video file–I know that XSplit even has adjustable audio levels for each separately (OBS may, too; I haven’t tinkered with it since a very early alpha).
Now, neither produces a separate audio file by default for, say, making podcasts of the commentary down the line, so you’d need to setup recording software if you wanted to capture clean mic audio for that purpose. . . otherwise it should be unnecessary.
Edit: You can also roll in multiple video sources/image overlays/web cams, etc. into XSplit (and, again, likely OBS, too). It’s even got hotkey-enabled scenes that can store certain arrangements of screen and audio to, say, go from a muted logo at the beginning of the video to mic’ed webcam with no system audio to go to monitor 1 at fullsize with 25% size webcam stream in the bottom corner with system audio and mic both on. . . all with the push of a couple of buttons.
It’s sort of an all in one game video-creation system. Needless to say, I’m an enormous fan.
If for some reason you have technical issues with OBS, FFsplit is another option that was made as a free alternative to Xsplit. I use it for Twitch streaming but it also has a record to hard drive option.
No problem. These are pretty amazing pieces of software, combing what 4-5 different things would have done 3 years ago or what wouldn’t have been possible without professional equipment 10 years ago. Glad that it got ya where ya needed to be. . . now I just get to look forward to the vidjas!
