Run SC2 replays without the game: Possible?

[Herr_Koos]

Hi all,

We have a once-a-month presentation at my workplace where we get together and talk about each other's interests and hobbies. For my next talk, I want to give them a bit of background on real-time strategy gaming, discuss the concepts, and then demo a StarCraft 2 match. I'd prefer this to be a replay so that I can pause, rewind and scroll around as needed while doing some commentary.

The problem I'm faced with is that I do not want to take my home PC to work unless there is no other choice. I'd rather play back a replay from my work laptop. Is there any way to show SC2 replays on a PC that doesn't have the game installed?

The other option is to use some kind of capture tool to record a video of the gameplay, but this a second-best choice.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be very welcome.

 

[Toxxyc]

Prepare the replay at home: Play it normally through the game engine and record it with Fraps. Do some magic, convert the video with a lossless full-framerate encoder and you won't lose much quality whatsoever. Video's can be encoded and written to DVD if the work laptop doesn't deal so well with resource intensive videos. Crappy rigs are known to run badly when confronted with a 1080p video in high-datarate videos like .mkv, but burning them to video DVD format solves a large part of this issue.

 

[Herr_Koos]

The freeware version of FRAPS does not allow unlimited recording, and I am not shelling out $37 to do this. Any alternatives?

 

[Herr_Koos]

I did some digging, and found out that VLC works surprisingly well for screencasting. Will test it this evening by recording a replay.

 

[Herr_Koos]

OK, so VLC works as long as you run the game in windowed mode, but it eats CPU cycles for breakfast. This will have to do though, unless someone else has another suggestion?

 

[Toxxyc]

Nope. Fraps is what I've been using. You can try ScreenRecord though. Not sure about licences.

Also, how come VLC eats resources? Does it actually encode during recording? Maybe if you can choose a different codec then, something requiring less resources?

 

[Herr_Koos]

VLC does transcode during recording. I currently have it set to H264, but I will play with the options a bit.

 

[Toxxyc]

Hmm. Pretty sad that it has to encode during recording. Puts immense stress on the system. My only guess is that with a better GPU you'll be able to up the quality/resolution a bit.