Fraps

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Fraps

Screenshot of Fraps version 2.8.0
Developed by	Beepa
Latest release	2.9.4 / January 14, 2008
OS	Microsoft Windows
Genre	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 determine a computer's performance with a game, as well as record gaming footage. The program is very popular in the making of amateur machinima films. Fraps is only available for Digital Purchase.

The Fraps codec allows decoding of Fraps-encoded videos (using a media player capable of decoding the AVI container format) or transcoding 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. This is because encoding on-the-fly to a high-compression format such as DivX would have a large negative impact on game performance (as of 2007) and only a very fast hard drive could record the immense amount of data produced in using uncompressed video. The Fraps format is a compromise of the two.

The freeware version of Fraps places an unremovable Fraps 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 1152×864 (full-size 4:3; 2048×1536 for half-size or 2560×1600 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 be capped to match the framerate of the recorded video; most commonly 30 frame/s. Although 30 frame/s is the average, a slow computer and a large program can send frame rates down significantly, resulting in a laggy video.

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

In order for Fraps to take pictures or capture videos onto their system, users must first be using a program that uses DirectX or OpenGL as a core runtime system. Programs that run in Windows without DirectX or OpenGL are not supported, and therefore Fraps cannot capture desktop applications under Windows 2000 and XP. In Windows Vista the Aero desktop runs through DirectX and can be captured by Fraps.

Unless disabled by the user, Fraps displays an frame/s count in the corner of the screen while it is active. 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, recording is activated by a user-defined key combination, and can be similarly interrupted. The frame/s count can be disabled within the control panel or be used with a keyboard shortcut.

Starting from version 2.9.0, Fraps supports DirectX 10, and generally is significantly more compatible with Windows Vista than previous versions.