Computer screen recording application for game

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I'm looking for an application to record video of Diablo 2 while I play it full screen (to put on YouTube). I've already tried a few, but they either didn't work or worked too slowly. My question: is there an application that can record while my game is running but still allow my game to run smoothly in full screen? I'd prefer not to pay a lot of money for it, because I don't foresee using it much more than this one time. However, I will pay if that's what it takes to be able to do this.

Granted, I'm not sure if this is even possible on this computer (I'm trying to do this on my MacBook Air). Still, I've gotten one of the newer versions of the MBA that have had a lot of the issues with the initial MBA fixed.

Here are my specs:

MacBook Air running Mac OS X v10.5.8
2.13 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor
2 GB Memory
Nvidia GeForce 9400M Graphics Card

I would think that, with those specs, my MBA could handle something like this, but I honestly don't know for sure.

Thank you for your time.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Macbook Pro, 4GB RAM, 250GB HD
umm.... try JING
 
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Jing didn't work on full screen - my mac got stuck on a black screen when I tried to switch to full screen. By the way, does Jing Pro only record up to 5 minutes? I noticed that the website stated something to that effect.

Screenflow costs 99$, which isn't a sum I'm willing to part with for something like this. I'd be interested to know if it works for something like this, though.


I'm considering recording in windowed mode, as that seems to work with any video recording program. If anybody knows of a program that would work with fullscreen, and preferably be less than 30$, though, I'd very much like to hear about it.

If it helps, a program that should do exactly what I'm looking to do is Hypercam, but Hypercam isn't for Mac. If anybody knows of a Mac equivalent of Hypercam, that might be what I'm looking for.


Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions.
 
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chas_m

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If you were running Snow Leopard, you could use QuickTime X to do this.

The basic problem here though is that ANY screen recorder is going to need to use considerable CPU to write and compress the video file on-the-fly while you are trying to use a CPU-intensive game.
 
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If you were running Snow Leopard, you could use QuickTime X to do this.

Actually, I'm getting Snow Leopard in a few days. Do you think Quicktime X could be helpful, then? I think I'll try that.


The basic problem here though is that ANY screen recorder is going to need to use considerable CPU to write and compress the video file on-the-fly while you are trying to use a CPU-intensive game.

The strange thing is, I can record video well enough in windowed mode (I tried a demo of iShowU); the problems start when I try to switch to full screen while recording. If I even manage to get the game to switch to fullscreen while the recording application is running, it runs very slowly.

According to activity monitor, playing the game full-screen (without recording) doesn't appear to take much more CPU usage than playing in windowed mode (usage does spike during the switch from windowed mode to fullscreen mode, though).
 
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Your Mac's Specs
MacBook 2.1GHz Core 2 Duo | 1GB RAM | OS X 10.6.3 | 250GB External HD | 8GB iPod Touch 1st Gen 3.1.3
Why do you need to record fullscreen for YouTube? And the only one I recommend would be ScreenFlow. It was well worth the $100. The quality is immaculate.

Or you could just wait until you get SL, so you can use QuickTime X to record your screen.
 
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chas_m

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According to activity monitor, playing the game full-screen (without recording) doesn't appear to take much more CPU usage than playing in windowed mode (usage does spike during the switch from windowed mode to fullscreen mode, though).

Yes, but the VIDEO CARD is working a lot harder.
 
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Why do you need to record fullscreen for YouTube?

I don't need to record fullscreen. I just find it a lot more tedious to play in windowed mode. I can and probably will do this in windowed mode, but I thought it was worth checking to see if there was anything capable of recording with full screen. I couldn't find anything using google (I searched for at least three hours and tried about 5 different applications), so I thought I'd ask here.


Yes, but the VIDEO CARD is working a lot harder.

I didn't think of that. This makes a lot more sense.
 

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