Steam Gets Skype Codec, Could Record Video
Steam is now using Skype's SILK codec for improved chat quality. There's also a new Portal 2 video, and talk about possible video capture capabilities within Steam.
Tuesday Valve Software said that its Steam distribution platform has been upgraded with the SILK voice codec, the same codec that was developed and is currently in use by Skype. Starting now, support will automatically be included in the Steam client once it's loaded or restarted.
"SILK provides a significant improvement to Steam's voice chat quality," Valve said in a brief email. "Steam voice chat is available both in one-on-one or group chats, and works both at the desktop as well as while a user is in game."
Following Valve's SILK announcement, rumors surfaced that Gabe Newell himself told long-time Team Fortress 2 community member "Political Gamer" that a video recording system for Steam would be made available "real soon." This would be the next logical step after Valve's recent addition of a screen capture feature to the Steam client.
There's also talk that Newell mentioned that Steam support may arrive on iOS and Android platforms in the near future. Valve is currently gearing up to launch Portal 2 on the PlayStation 3 which will also include the company's Steamworks client. This will be Valve's first use of its Steam platform within a console title to date.
Tuesday Valve also launched a new "investment opportunity" series of videos promoting Portal 2. The first video, pasted below, is called "Panels" and showcases one of the many lucrative products in development at the applied sciences company. The feature clip is narrated by the fictional Aperture CEO and founder, Cave Johnson.
Valve said the other three videos in the "investment opportunity" series will be unleashed at thinkwithportals.com every week leading up to the release of Portal 2 on April 19 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Windows PC.
Isnt that how all game recorders work? Since it doesnt compress and record at the same time. If it did it would hog all your system resources... playing a game, capturing video, while compressing at the same time seems impossible to me.
Anything thats smaller than what FRAPS is outputting at the same resolution/framerate will probably have heavy compression thats going to mangle your performance even more.
So what will recording a game while trying to play be like?.....LAG.
Anything thats smaller than what FRAPS is outputting at the same resolution/framerate will probably have heavy compression thats going to mangle your performance even more.
There's one good alternative to FRAPS, Dxtory. Not many know about this software though, since it's a Japanese software.
It allows different codecs to be used (in my opinion its default codec is better though, which has 4 quality settings available, True Quality, High Quality, Medium Quality, Low Quality), it allows recording to be done in any framerate, allows any resolution to be recorded (it can record at 100%, 75%, 50% or even a custom resolution), ...
I haven't tried FRAPS for a long time, so I don't know how Dxtory compares with FRAPS now. When I tried FRAPS the last time (I think it was version 3.03), FRAPS affected the framerate of the game while recording, but with Dxtory, recording doesn't affect/barely affects the framerate of the game, since there's an option for the recording FPS and the game FPS to not be synched.
Dxtory creates bigger files than FRAPS while recording though, so it's not a good software for those worried about FRAPS creating big files, since these are even bigger. :>
There is one really big bottleneck though, hard drive speed. For example, to record at my screen resolution (1440x900) I have to use the medium quality codec setting and record at 30fps.