Fraps recording and screen tearing: should I use triple buffering?

[orion44]

Usually when I play MAME games, there is screen tearing, which disappears when I turn on triple buffering.

Few questions:

1. When I record MAME games, should I record with or without screen tearing?

2. Does triple buffering cause input lag?

3. When I record gameplay videos with screen tearing, the screen tearing isn't noticeable in software players like PotPlayer and KMPlayer.
If I upload this same video to youtube, will other people notice screen tearing?

[Asmodian]

1) I hate tearing.

2) less than double buffering but more than nothing (tearing)

3) players and YouTube will behave similarly but I am pretty sure I would notice the tearing. Tearing will also lower the quality per bit, though maybe not too much.

[huhn]

it is possible that the recording doesn't have tearing but the game on the screen.

this depends on how the image is captured. fraps should avoid tearing in the recording.

[LexSfX]

Triple buffering is a technique to reduce input lag, by always serving the most recently-drawn frame. As I understand it, with triple buffering, there are 3 buffers: 1 currently being drawn at any given time, 1 finished drawing and waiting to be swapped to screen, 1 drawn to screen on next vblank. When vblank happens, GPU sends front buffer then swaps front buffer pointer with middle buffer. When program finished drawing a frame, GPU swap middle buffer pointer with back buffer. I'm not an expert, but this is how I understand it.

This allows the program to not have to wait after drawing a frame to draw another frame, as it can always draw onto a new back buffer, and the front buffer can always request a fully-drawn frame without having to wait for the frame to finish drawing.