Why use Fraps? DosBox already supports video capture and it's lossless!

A quick question on the video capture built into DOSBox. From what I've read it uses 'yet another' codec - any chance of it being able to use something that already exists on the PC?

Perhaps I should add the 'request' to the DOSBox plug-in ideas thread 😀

The codec is efficient, lossless, freely available and could be packaged with dosbox -- where's the problem?

Yeah, and you can always use virtualdub to convert it into another codec.

DosFreak wrote:

Yeah, and you can always use virtualdub to convert it into another codec.

Codecs are just a means to an end but choosing one that [to me] is actually fairly unknown is almost certainly going to lead to video files being converted before being exchanged or explanations on how/what to do with a codec download in order to watch the vid. Obviously that's a possibility whatever codec is chosen but some are more used than others.

Anyways, it was just an observation...

I'd agree, but this codec seems to be a perfect match for DOSBox in terms of efficiency and speed, so there are strong arguments for it. I think the windows installer should automatically install the codec, so there would be few interoperability issues - I guess most people who are interested in such videos have dosbox themselves.

But since the codec is lossless, only the re-encoding will cause any loss . This way the people releasing the video have complete control of codec choice (re-encode into what's needed) and can tweak the output to suit themselves.

If you're making a vid, this shouldn't be too burdensome.

If you still want to use fraps, just change output mode to opengl and it should work.