Please note that video capturing is only available in recent beta versions of the software. The latest beta version at the time of writing is MSI Afterburner 2.2 Beta 5. You can download the application from the official download page.

The video capture settings are available in the properties, which you can access after installation and startup. A click on the Settings button in the main application interface opens the properties window. Use the right arrow at the top to locate the Video Capture tab and click on it.

Here you define the global video capturing hotkey, the video format, quality, frame rate and the video output folder. Suggested settings are MJPG compression with a 100% quality setting, full frame size and a framerate of 25 or 30. You may need to experiment with the settings depending on the performance of your computer system and the screen resolution. Remember that you not only have to capture the video but to play as well.

Audio is automatically captured. Users who do not want that can disable audio capturing in the same configuration menu.

Make sure you define a global hotkey that is not registered by the programs that you are using. It can happen otherwise that the hotkey may not work or that it may trigger program functionality as well.

The hotkey will start and stop the video recording in games. A recording session is indicated with a small, barely visible circle in the upper left corner of the screen. This circle will not be on the resulting video. You may need to test a few configurations to find the best suitable settings for your computer system.

I have created a small Counter Strike Source video to demonstrate the recording capabilities.

Please note that this is not the high quality version of the video. You need to visit YouTube and select the highest resolution there to see it.

The size of the video depends largely on the screen resolution, compression and quality setting. The 3.25 minute test video occupied nearly 1.5 Gigabytes of space on the computer’s hard drive. This size can be reduced significantly by reducing the quality level or the video resolution (either before or after the capture). For demonstration purposes, everything was left untouched.

The video capturing capabilities of MSI Afterburner are on pair with those of Fraps. Users who are looking for a free Fraps alternative should take a closer look at MSI Afterburner, as it offers nearly everything that Fraps offers. Nearly? The program does not support external video compression codecs.

Cautious users may want to wait until the version is out of beta before they install and use it. I did not experience any problems or issues running it, but that again may depend on the PC system.

Download Helper for example will automatically identify videos that are played on websites offering the user a download link of that video. Most of the solutions that have been created require at least some manual interaction with the program.

Not so with WebVideoCap. The portable video capture software has been created by Nirsoft, one of our all-time favorite software developers. The software will automatically save videos that are played on websites to a folder on the local computer system. All the user needs to do to start the capturing is to click on the Start Capture button in the application’s interface.

A few parameters and options are available; It is for example possible to select the network adapter, save folder, scan method (between raw sockets and WinPCap) or file types that should be saved automatically. WebVideoCap supports the following web video stream formats:

• Flash video files (with .flv extension)
• Microsoft Windows media files (with .wmv extension)
• RTSP streams. (RTSP protocol is used by many news and live TV/radio Web sites)
• MMS streams. (MMS protocol is used by many news and live TV/radio Web sites)

All videos that match the supported video stream formats are saved automatically once the capturing process has been started. This can be very helpful for users who regularly download videos from video portals. One slight problem was encountered during tests. If the videos contain an age verification (like the 18+ video games over at Gametrailers) then they cannot be saved as the capturing process is interrupted by this). Videos that do not contain this interference are saved without problems.

Screen2Exe comes with the option to create a recording of the full desktop or only part of it. The only two options that are available as well before starting the recording are to include audio in the recording and to set a frame rate for it.

A click on the Start Recording button will start the recording process of the computer screen once the parameters have been set (or the default ones left untouched). The program will display a five second countdown before it starts to record the whole screen or the selected window.

A set of post-recording options are available. It is possible to save the screen recording right away to the local computer system, run a frame optimization script to remove unnecessary frames to reduce the size of the output or to open the editing options.

These basic editing options allow a user to add annotations, images, delays, mosaics, to zoom or focus, cut the clip or to optimize the frames. The screen recording can be played in the interface. Once the editing has been done the recording can be saved.

Screen2Exe is a basic screen recording software that should suffice for demonstrations that do not rely on fast moving objects or images. Users who need more options and a selection of other output file formats might want to check out the screen capture software Webinaria, the online desktop recorder ScreenToaster, Debut or Camtasia.

Debut can capture the entire screen or a rectangular area selected by the user plus it can record sound from any source connected to the computer if so desired. It has a wide range of output formats and quality settings. Videos can be captured in avi, mov, flv and several other formats. Several video encoder options can be changed in the program’s settings.

Minor video capture editing is supported as well. The user can change the framerate and size of the output video and apply video effects and text annotations which comes in handy for demonstration videos.

It can capture fullscreen which it does ok for desktop applications. Before you can capture applications that hide the program interface of Debut you need to set global shortcuts in the program options.

Debut Video Capture Software is definitely more a software to capture the screen or part of the screen that it would be a replacement for applications like Fraps which is great for games. What I really like is that it can capture the sound from a microphone which means that you can create demonstration videos on the fly without having to record the sound in the editing process.