I made a test recording of running around a town in TES: Arena. First, I have a question for Harekiet: Is there any way it could be made so that it will record the entire output of my sound card and not just DOSBox's sound output? I use an external MIDI synth connected to the line in of my sound card, so I had to switch to emulated Gravis Ultrasound to get good music in my recording.
I used Moe's OpenGLHQ SDL.dll at 640x480 fullscreen, as I'm having trouble with the SDL CVS at the moment. I was able to get it to run extremely smooth with the new rendering optimizations (much smoother than ever before - completely playable at full detail!).
Anyways, I ran around town for a couple minutes and got a 45MB recording:
I first tried playing it in Media Player Classic. FFDShow was not used, but AC3Filter decoded the audio. Video was sharp and smooth, except that it was showing in the wrong aspect (widescreen) due to the 320x200 resolution (I was able to force it to the proper size by forcing 4:3 aspect ratio in Media Player Classic). I also noticed as soon as the music started that the audio was ahead of the video and getting progressively worse. By a minute in, the audio was at least 10 seconds ahead of the video. I noticed that when the progress bar got to the end of the video, it still had a good 30 seconds left to play (which it played without sound, as the sound had already finished).
I also noticed that if I seeked directly to any point in the video, the sound and video would resynchronize at the proper point.
I then tried playing the video in Winamp. The sound and video stayed synchronized throughout the entire playback!
I then used VirtualDub to compress the video to 320kbps (very low) XVID and 48kbps 22050Hz MP3 audio. This resulted in a 6MB file, but the video was very blurry:
Playing it back in Media Player Classic (ffdshow decoding) the only issue I noticed was that the video would hiccup/pause every few seconds. Winamp didn't hiccup at all.
I noticed that the video framerate was just over 70fps, which reminded my of cmw's comments. So, I went back to VirtualDub and recompressed the video, this time telling it to throw away every other frame of video. Now, it plays just fine in both Winamp and Media Player Classic without any noticable loss in smoothness.