Capturing video output of computer?

[Cabadam]

I'm somewhat familiar with capturing from TV, VCR, etc (external sources) but is there any way to record what is being displayed on a monitor by a computer? (Specifically on the SAME computer)?

I know that the Sound Blaster card I have has a "What you hear" feature that allows you to effectively do that with sound, but what about video? Is it possible?

[dvd_maniac]

i have an old computer with a radeon 32mb all-in-wonder and I guess if I wanted to I could hook that into my new pc which has a radeon AIW 9700 pro. I could put the output of either into the input of either. Other ways of accomplishing this would be to hook up the output from your tv out or whatever your card supports and hook it up to a vcr, tivo, or whatever external recording device you have and then capture it back to H/D.
Here is a link to a simple yahoo search with program that will do what you want with no extra hardware but they all cost.
search results here (http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=capture+pc+screen&fr=my_top)

[FredThompson]

CamStudio is free.

http://www.rendersoftware.com/

[pk24]

get real choppy playback when using camtasia or similar prog

[jggimi]

Thread moved to PC Hardware/Software.

[FredThompson]

Originally posted by pk24
get real choppy playback when using camtasia or similar prog Do you have a relatively slow computer? Takes a lot of power to play video at full screen video and record it.

[pk24]

got a amd xp2200+ over 1gig memory and 300gig of h-drive

[FredThompson]

only one hard drive? could it be a buffering issue or are you capturing to a defragged destination? ATA100 or better, right?

Another thing to look at is color depth. If you're driving, say, 32 bit color but encoding/playing back 24 bit, that could add overhead/problems.

Is it a problem with playback only or capture?

Are you killing all resident junk and only running critical stuff during capture/playback?

Personally, I don't have any experience with playback from Camtasia or CamStudio, only capture.

You might want to try one of the lossless codecs that are on my links page at Donald Graft's site. They're scattered throughout the forums here but more easily found in the codecs section of the links list.

What is your source material and what display drivers? If Matrox or ATI, perhaps you should try OmegaDrive's optimized versions.