Need advice on screen recording applications

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

I want to capture video displayed on my laptop but do not know what
screen recording application will give me quality approaching lossless
compression. Specifically, I've been amazed at the views available in
Google Earth and would like to capture the "flying" tours as they
appear on my laptop. However, I have been frustrated with the results
I've gotten so far.

First, I tried capturing on my DV camera using the S-Video out and then
recaptured the recorded sequence from the DV camera back to my laptop.
The quality was disappointing (edges took on a finely jigsawed look)
and I felt like I was doing two or three times the capturing necessary.


Second, I tried the free trial of River Past Screen Recorder. That was
worse than the DV camera method. I maxed out the speed at "15" (frames
per second?) but came away with what looked like 3-5 fps. It was
terrible. And the images weren't any crisper than with the DV method.

I've got a moderately fast laptop (Inspiron 9200, 1GB DDR, 333MHz 2
Dimm) and have an external 250GB hard drive so space is not an issue.
I'd simply like to record (in AVI) the frames exactly as Google streams
them to me with the same quality for clips of about 5 minutes. Is there
no way to do this? Am I looking for "lossless compression"? Advice
anyone?