Video Capture Software Evaluation - PlayClaw

Breaking my ultimate game capture software review/evaluation down into individual articles for each software as I test them and then will have one major recap at the end where I will pick my favorite and make recommendations. I am going to kick things off with the first article being for PlayClaw because I had to admit I was taken by surprise when I started testing this software and feel that it deserves an article for some attention by fellow let's play artist and video producers.

You can download the latest version of PlayClaw here. Beta 3 Build 1811 is what I used.

When it comes to evaluating capture software here is a short list of some of the major things I was looking at.

• Overall Performance - Does it lag the gameplay or system? Does it cap your in-game frame rate (a-la fraps)
• Compatibility - Are the files produced easy to work with on an editor, does it use a proprietary codec or a common codec, is there 64bit codec support?
• Options - Does it allow recording of both gameplay & external audio at the same time? Does it allow you to set your frame rate, your codec, recording size?
• Cost - Is it worth the money?

So lets get into it and talk about what I discovered in my testing.

Overall Performance

Is very good, when recording frame rate drops but not significantly. The one major thing I look for here is does recording cap your frame rate to the recording frame rate like FRAPS does (what I consider one of FRAPS largest downfalls). The answer is NO you can record at 30fps and be playing at 90fps with this software. Also it takes full advantage of multi-core cpus, you can even configure the number of threads to use manually. PlayClaw is getting top marks for performance.

Editor Update: PlayClaw does not have fully unlocked frame rates when recording it must work at a multiple of your recording frame rate. So if your set to 30fps, your game can run @ 30, 60, 90, 120fps etc. HOWEVER if your game can not maintain 30fps+ at all times while recording it will drop to 15fps. FRAPS has the same behavior with its new uncap frame rate recording feature that was introduced a few revisions ago. I feel overall PlayClaw is still giving me a higher frame rate when recording though and also smaller file sizes.

Compatibility

Compatibility is also very good however there are some limitations.

Video

PlayClaw only has 2 codec options MJPEG (motion jpeg) or uncompressed. You can just forget about uncompressed its WAY too large of a file and you may even need RAID0 just to keep up with the massive write demands, so honestly your down to one choice MJPEG. MJPEG is as old as the hills so this gives it a double edged appeal. On one side of things since its so old its highly compatible any editor should accept the files no problem.

The other side of the situation is that its lacking in versatility compared to newer codecs like H264. It's going to be larger and not as well compressed also MJPEG is lossy so some quality is lost in the capture process. You can set a "quality" variable I think the max was 95% and captures looked very good but I do like having the option for a lossless codec. I would need still's to compare the MJPEG capture to say FRAPS FPS1 capture to see how they compare. I can safely say 99% of users would be fine with this quality however there are a 1% of users out there like myself that like having things "perfect" just for the sake of knowing its perfect.

Audio

Audio is really nicely available to you in a mixed package as well. You can from Windows configure if you want audio to be downmixed to stereo (recommended) and you can manually choose your input sources (max of 2) so you can record just the game, just your microphone or both! best yet it lets you choose to have the audio as part of your video file or you can have them separately saved to your hard drive as individual audio files. This is a power users dream as this gives you control of your vocal track for commentary to make sure everything is the proper volume and not have to worry about turning down in-game volume in hopes your voice is loud enough. Also it allows you to filter your vocal track for noise should you have lots of background noise or a hiss from your microphone.

Options

There are a lot of options here and lots of fluffy extras I have not touched, which I won't get into now.

First this is not just a capture software. It is also a full software monitoring suite. It has a overlay in game that shows your CPU Load & Temperature, GPU Load & Temperature, the current Time, your Direct X mode, Current resolution, Codec info. Its pretty fully loaded in these regards so it can be used as a benchmarking software in addition to capture software. It does screenshots as well if you need that feature.

Configuration

Some of the lacking areas are the fact that 98% of the options have to be set in-game via the overlay and not from Windows via the program. This means if there is a game the overlay does not work with you may be in trouble. I have had no issues yet but I did see forum posts about the overlay not working with say BF3 (been fixed since just an example) I think it would be wise to allow more options to be set from Windows and have a mode where the capture software can run for games that do not currently support the overlay so you can still capture with the software while waiting on overlay updates. There is a great array of options here though, the overlay can be customized, you can choose to record or not record the cursor, and other minor things.

Codecs

Another area lacking options like I hinted at above is codecs. For video you only have 2 picks, and for audio its only one. Everything is captured as a PCM codec. This is the codec I would use so it does not effect me but having options is nice. ZDSoft another capture software lets you set your own codec for video & audio out of all the VFW codecs installed on your computer. So I can for example use Lagarith a really great multi-core lossless codec for video, or H264 if say I want great compression while recording.

Recording Size

One major flaw right now that I will mention below in my testing video is the resizing option. This is going to mostly only effect multi monitor users that need or want to resize full resolution video for a performance boost or to save hdd space. PlayClaw does support live resizing for capture but it only lets me choose a preset like 1920x1080 or 1920x1200, 1280x720. None of these would work when I am running 5940x1200 and want to cut my video size down to about half. I have no need for video that large when its going to youtube and its just using extra HDD space and computer resources. I am sure they can implement this into a future build but currently it is not there. I know its a small % of people not using standard 16:10 or 16:9 aspect ratios so the presets make sense but really I cant think of any reason to not be able to set your own resolution via the options.

I suggested on there forums that they implement custom resize options and also have it setup in a way so that if you supply a new resolution for one value (X,Y) the program can tell you the matching opposite value to maintain the proper aspect ratio (but not force you to use a locked aspect ratio) if they really want to take it to the next level they can implement cropping capability into live capture as well.

Cost

My final major focus is cost or value for the product. I could care less if its 2X better than FRAPS if it cost 20x more I wont bite. As FRAPS is the standard right now thats pretty much my point of comparison.

Final Thoughts

PlayClaw cost $30 for the full version and states that "all minor upgrades are free" it's that second part that scared me not the cost. The cost of $30 is great actually beating FRAPS that currently cost $37 but the difference is FRAPS very clearly says "buy it once and all updates are free for life" luckily there is a sticky on the PlayClaw forum that makes more sense of this and the admin stated that any version updates like 1.X to 2.X will be free and they are still putting a lot of new features and development into the program. The only thing that would be considered a "major" upgrade would be if they had to redesign the program for say a new windows operating system.

So its .... pretty good on value. I would much prefer the seal "free upgrades for life" like FRAPS but you get a $7.00 savings and I can't say that I expect any major upgrades that would warrant needing to purchase the program all over again any time in the near future.

Seeing how this program has uncapped frame rates, dual audio w/ separate file recording, supports eyefinity resolutions, and a great overlay. It has taken my #1 spot in choice for recording software at the time of writing this article. Once they fix up the resize option for eyefinity this is a serious winner and maybe the first software I can say truly dethrones FRAPS and its not even fully developed yet!

I did a small test video today to see if the program would work with Eyefinity and to test performance results. You can check out this video below to see an actual recording made with PlayClaw.

Enjoy!