Fraps freezes and then stops working. Help, please!

Hello, friends.

I'm on Windows 7, 64-bit, using Fraps 3.4.6 and I'm having some trouble recording footage. Everything goes fine until I reach a full 4GB file. Once the program films that much, it freezes anywhere from ten to twenty seconds, stops recording, and refuses to record as long as Fraps isn't restarted. The file it leaves behind is a 4GB .TMP and this has occurred with multiple games for me so far (E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy, Rock of Ages, Hard Reset demo). Does anyone have any ideas about what could fix this? Google didn't show any results for problems like this one.

Any help would be appreciated <3

I'm guessing low free space on the HD, or else it's seriously fragmented.
Or, maybe a background process (antivirus etc) has locked the file...?
If that's not it, please post
* "Folder to save movies in" you set in Fraps: exact path
* HD type (model, size, free space, internal/external)

Thanks for the quick response.

As far as I can tell, Microsoft Security Essentials is constantly open but I don't play games while I'm running scans. Can running the program without actually using it actually interfere?
Also, I clicked on your "background process" link, and I'm a little reluctant to disable a whole bunch of automatic updates.

I save my videos on C:\Fraps\Movies, no big interesting clues there. It's on a 1.36TB internal hard drive currently with 767 GB of free space, which can be found here, I believe: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136793
I didn't think about it possibly being fragmented, but I haven't encountered any other problems with it. That said, the Frapsing problem is pretty new so I may have to defrag.

Hmm...not making this easy... [EDIT - I mean this problem is not an easy one, not that you're being difficult!]

well at least try turning off Microsoft Security Essentials real time protection temporarily, and close your browser, instant messaging, iTunes etc -- just for testing.

Is there a lot of disk activity when the freeze happens? How about CPU usage? I'm guessing not.

If you stop recording before you get a 4GB capture file, everything is OK, right?

I think next step would be to uninstall Fraps & reinstall. If that doesn't work...

Check Event Viewer, under both the Application & System category. Find any Error or Warning events that occurred during the last time you were capturing; note the events' Source and Description and post them here please. (screen shots are XP but shouldn't matter)


Download Process Explorer from Microsoft to find out which program is holding onto that .TMP file (do this search while Fraps is frozen of course).



maybe that will give us some clues...

Per frapsforum.com's advice, I told MSE not to have anything to do with Fraps and my Fraps folder.

As for resource usage, the task manager tells me that my overall mem/CPU usage goes down when I record. It stays lower too when freezing.

And when recording something less than 4GB, Fraps still freezes, but the video file itself is left intact and I can watch it later. If I keep my videos short enough, I can still record more afterward.

Also, I've already reinstalled Fraps. I even updated it to the latest version.

The only error I have in Event Viewer is under the "Application" section, only occurring once though I have recorded something to the point of freezing quite a few times. It involves Counter-Strike: Source (my specimen for today) and it seems to have something to do with the Steam overlay, considering some of the things it says. However, I tried recording again, and the Steam overlay worked perfectly fine before, during, and after recording.

Process Explorer didn't turn up anything with .TMP files other than one that Steam was constantly using to run CS:S. I made sure to be quick and do a search before Fraps stopped freezing the game, like you asked. I hope at least some of this vague crap can help you guys help me.

GOOD NEWS EVERYONE

Or not really, I just wanted people to read what I wrote in the voice of Professor Farnsworth.

Anyway, a little after I posted that, Fraps crashed. I'm not sure if it's relevant to the problems I've been having at all, but it's worth a shot. Here's what Event Viewer has to say:
http://i.imgur.com/6RyZR.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/wHpFl.jpg

Copypasted text from these images:
Faulting application name: fraps.exe, version 3.4.6.13747, time stamp: 0x4e34fb43
Faulting module name: fraps.exe, version 3.4.6.13747, time stamp: 0x4e34fb43
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0006a2ac
Faulting process id: 0x12f8
Faulting application start time: 0x01cc6fd07ec8bb73
Faulting application path: C:\Fraps\fraps.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Fraps\fraps.exe
Report Id: 3641e9f1-dbc5-11e0-ad46-001a4d41d5ed

Thank you for pursuing this. Not a very helpful error message, at least for me. It should be useful for Fraps support though.

Event Viewer took away the Copy as Text button? Typical.

I'm out of ideas

Well I certainly won't shoot my computer. Perhaps I should defrag? I'll probably wait until frapsforum.com guy says something

Would you take a look at this and see if the proposed solution works for you?

WOAH WOAH WOAH

The thing you just linked me to didn't help me, but a thing inside the thing you linked me to did. ashley, underneath koala85, held the answer to my problem.

So uh, Googlers with my problem, the solution is to uncheck "Record external input" in Fraps. My microphone wasn't plugged in, so I guess it was having a hissy fit about not being able to access the mic that it had thought was there.

As for that error that you asked me to copy-paste into the forum, I'll edit them into a previous post.

Thank you all for your invaluable support, and I hope you don't have to help anyone out with this silly problem ever again.

Holy Moly, I filtered that out because it didn't correspond with my view of reality. I am confused but elated for you.

EDIT - for future Googlers, you might as well check out cmasupra's solution in the same thread. It also makes no sense to me.