A very common topic on this forum is how badly fraps videos play in everyone's media player of choice. Most of the time this isn't due to the game lagging, or a bug in fraps. The simple fact is that fraps footage is incredibly 'raw' in format, and as such there is way more data in it than what is found in most video files you play on your computer. Take for example this screenshot of my fraps folder: What you see above is the top file being the original fraps file, and then the files below all being that same original file after it has been encoded using various programs. So, this gives us another question: Why are fraps files so big? Looking inside the original fraps file gives us this information: Code: General Complete name : F:\Terraria 2012-01-21 20-34-22-21.avi Format : AVI Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave File size : 3.95 GiB Duration : 1mn 52s Overall bit rate : 301 Mbps Video ID : 0 Format : Fraps Codec ID : FPS1 Duration : 1mn 52s Bit rate : 300 Mbps Width : 1 920 pixels Height : 1 080 pixels Display aspect ratio : 16:9 Frame rate : 30.000 fps Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 4.821 Stream size : 3.93 GiB (99%) Audio ID : 1 Format : PCM Format settings, Endianness : Little Format settings, Sign : Signed Codec ID : 1 Duration : 1mn 52s Bit rate mode : Constant Bit rate : 1 536 Kbps Channel(s) : 2 channels Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz Bit depth : 16 bits Stream size : 20.6 MiB (1%) Interleave, duration : 996 ms (29.88 video frames) Look at the bitrate. We are looking at a video with a bitrate of 300 megabits a second. Bluray movies cap out at around 55 megabits a second. Are you starting to see the problem here? This fraps file is literally spewing out so much information that the media player you loaded it into is wanting to die. Look above at the image again. There are 5 files in the screenshot. That same video once encoded in Adobe Premiere (on a very high quality setting) ends up with a bitrate of around 12.5 megabits a second. If we go even further down the list and look at the .mkv file encoded in staxrip, the bitrate is down to under 3 megabits a second without a major drop in quality. It is still perfectly fine to watch. Any modern video player will be able to handle the 4 encoded files without a stutter for the most part. The only major downside to encoding footage is how long it can take, as well as getting the settings right to make a video maintain its quality. A fast processor is incredibly helpful for encoding fraps footage. Hopefully the other posts in this forum can point you in the right direction in regards to picking out the right encoding/editing suite for your needs. This post was mainly made to show how important it is to encode your footage.
