using screen capture software to convert a movie

[octeuron]

i always wondered if its possible to convert a movie to avi with a screen capture program.

my original thought regarding this was that there would be serious lag or choppy video with dropped frames.... but when i watch captured video-game videos on youtube they seem really high quality and really fast so could this be possible to do it with movies?

the idea of simply playing a dvd and screen capturing it in real time is sort of enticing especially since some programs take 5+ hours to do it in good quality.
(surely there must be some sort reason why people dont... perhaps lagging, low fps, or huge file size? otherwise i cant imagine why people would not do it)

[Die*wrek*show]

I'm pretty certain that the reason it's not usually done is because it's an ineffiecient way to encode a movie.

I don't think seeing good halo capture videos on youtube = it's easy to make good dvd encodes using screen capture software.

All that really proves to me, is that either someone had a really good source video to begin with and/or they took the time to make a good encode.

If you have the time to spend, it's possible make some pretty impressive youtube vids. For example:

hd test (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfvdVRrM90Y)

[CWR03]

It takes a fairly fast computer to capture smooth, high-quality video from a game and encode on the fly. A computer that can do that can encode DVD video in a single pass in less than the run time of the video itself, unless you're upscaling or using heavy filters.

[Ghitulescu]

i always wondered if its possible to convert a movie to avi with a screen capture program.

There is somewhere here, at doom9, a thread about such a converter. If I'm not mistaken, it was supposed to "rip" HD movies into AVI.

[darkNiGHTS]

FRAPs seems to work very well on games, my friend was getting 60fps no problem, but I don't know how you would make it record videos. Maybe have the video output to the directx buffer?

[CWR03]

Fraps will capture video just as easily as it will capture from a game, but again, why would you want to? You'll have to use a constant bitrate, which means either high-motion parts of the video will become blocky for lack of bitrate or the file will have to be much bigger because it's set higher than necessary. Ripping and encoding single-pass with average bitrate will take less time and will yield a better quality and/or smaller video.