Fraps

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Fraps

Screenshot of Fraps version 2.8.0
Developer:	Beepa
Latest release:	2.8.1 / October 26, 2006
OS:	Microsoft Windows
Use:	Screencasting
License:	Proprietary
Website:	fraps.com

Fraps (derived from Frames per Second) is a benchmarking, screen capture, and real-time video capture utility for DirectX and OpenGL applications. It is commonly used to record gaming footage. The program is very popular in the making of amateur machinima films.

The Fraps codec allows decoding of Fraps-encoded videos (using a media player capable of decoding the AVI container format) or conversion to other video formats (with the use of the right software). The Fraps video codec manages to capture videos with minimal impact on game performance, as it has been optimized to achieve compression higher than uncompressed RGB, resulting in smaller filesizes, though the format is considerably less space-efficient than more heavily compressed video formats such as DivX. (Few computers can encode video to high-compression formats such as DivX on the fly, and few hard drives are fast enough to be able to record the immense amount of data produced in using uncompressed video. The Fraps format is a compromise of the two.)

The free version of Fraps displays an unremovable Fraps header (watermark) at the top of every video, and video length is capped at 30 seconds. In the full payware version of the software, videos are recorded without the Fraps header indefinitely at a maximum resolution of 1152x864 (full-size 4:3; 2048x1536 for half-size or 2560x1600 for full-size with a dual-core CPU) and a rate up to 100 frames per second. When recording mode is switched on, Fraps and whatever application is being recorded will "hold themselves back" to match the framerate of the recorded video; most commonly 30 FPS.

Fraps can also take screenshots in various formats: BMP, TGA, JPEG and PNG. However, only the BMP format is available in the free version.

When active, Fraps displays an FPS count in the corner of the screen. This number display does not show up in the recorded video, and shows as yellow when not recording and red when recording. It also flashes to black text-on-white background for screen captures for the single frame that was captured. Fraps runs in the background, and is activated by a user-defined key combination. It can be stopped in a similar way.