A capture utility would most probably ruin my (already-low) framerate. It’s an unfortunate fact that the Windows client just runs *better* than the Mac one does.

I shudder to think how our Linux friends must feel :/

I’ve been enjoying this conversation. I wonder if iShowU would be any better than SnapzPro on Mac OS X. On the one hand it capture to RAM instead of disk to speed things up and on the other it compresses as it captures. So Snapz has a long wait at the end while it compresses/encode the video it shot on disk during the capture process while iShowU consumes more resources during the capture with no wait at the end… but will it consume too much to make a good image with that resource hog of SL running?

OK, from the FRAPS FAQ (and it implies that the problem you have with your huge video file may be the same as that generated by FRAPS video captures):

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Why is the AVI movie generated by Fraps so big? How can I reduce the size?

The filesize is big because there isn’t enough time to encode the movie while the game is running. The movie frames are slightly compressed, but still require a large amount of disk space due to the high resolutions. Once you have finished capturing you should convert the saved AVI into one of the popular compressed movie formats such as mpeg or divx. Recommended programs for doing this are tmpgenc (Tsunami Mpeg Encoder), and VirtualDub.

Using VirtualDub is quite easy. To create a compressed version of the AVI follow these steps:

* Start VirtualDub
* Select File->Open and choose the AVI in the Fraps directory you wish to compress.
* Select Video->Compression and choose the codec you wish to compress with (usually divx)
* Select File->Save As AVI and specify a filename for the new AVI.

If you have Windows XP you can also use Windows Movie Maker to compress the video files. If you use Windows Movie Maker it’s recommended that you keep your Fraps video files at 800×600 or under.
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VirtualDub is free and available here: http://www.virtualdub.org/
Now that I read the site closely, I can’t recall why I didn’t use this right off the bat for my video capture too :/ I think I was never able to find an effective tutorial for the parameters I needed for the conversion to MPEG-1 in VirtualDub, but my memory is hazy…

TMPGEnc => is no freeware? :(

The FRAPS codec is an odd bird, is completely uncompressed, and doesn’t play well with others. TMPGEnc should take care of it; I get average 150-200MB captures down to less than 7MB when I encode to .mpg.

As a suggestion, don’t ever shoot fullscreen :) There’s very little to be gained with the additional resolution (even DVD only has 640 x 400 resolution, more or less) and you’ll have to sacrifice it when you render your movie, and it will definitely impact on your framerate and hard drive efficiency during the capture…

Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the file.

Wrath, is 1.5gb (smallest one) and 4gb (largest one) to large for my system to handle? But looking at the file size, I assume I did film something. :p

I wrote a tutorial on capturing and encoding machinima that’s available here, that might help you recover this video. At the very least, re-encoding to .mpg for example might result in a more manageable file size that you could more easily manipulate…

It’s worth a shot :) Good luck!