Need help recording game footage

[2xSlick]

Well, up until this point Fraps has done a fair job recording footage for my dumb game reviews, but more modern games like Crysis or Hellgate simply suck up too many resources to both play and record. Even a few decade old games that rely mostly on the cpu have sapped my computer. To make matters worse, the latest version of Fraps seems to have a bug where it only records the first second of sound.

I would really like to know if it's possible to somehow play a game on one computer and record onto another through a lan connection. That sounds pretty outlandish to me though, so I'd settle for suggestions for other programs besides fraps. Any tips or comments would help greatly.

[tyckspoon]

I think that should be possible, although probably not simple. You'll need either a way to get two computers to share a monitor (the tricky part here is probably letting both of them have control/access to what's on the monitor at the same time) or, and probably more feasibly, splitting the video output of the computer running the game so it's displaying on the monitor of the computer that's running the recording software at the same time you're playing it. I've never tried to do such a thing myself, so I'm afraid I don't know of any particular products that might help. Try asking at a forum that has a bigger A/V community; the people who do Let's Plays at SomethingAwful and Penny Arcade could probably give good advice.

[2xSlick]

Hmm, I'll give the guys at Penny-Arcade a try. Never seen a message board with over a million threads... Splicing the video output will probablly be the way to go; didn't even think of that. Thank you. Now if you'd answer me another question, why on earth does it cost $10 to register on Something-Awful's forums?!

[tyckspoon]

I'd forgotten about the registration fee at SA. I think the basic reason is that they don't want to become /b/. The fee helps keep their hugeness from turning into Mass Internet Idiocy, not that it necessarily works.