Help:Video capture options
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This help page belongs to Help category Video
Contents |
Video capture options
To access the video capture options, open the Tools menu in main Xfire window and select Options.... There select the Video tab.
On the right side you can see a screenshot of the video capture options tab. All the controls there are explained in this document.
Video Capture Options
First there is a checkbox labeled Enable Video Capture. This controls whether the whole video capture feature is available or not. The rest of the settings are unavailable if this box is unchecked.
The Video Capture Folder shows the current location of where the recorded videos will be saved. This is also the folder where Xfire is looking for the video files to populate the Files/Videos tab in the Xfire program. The Browse... button can be used to change the capture folder. In the example screenshot this field is in its default value C:\Program Files\Xfire\videos.
Below the path is a button labeled Video Capture Key Binding which can be used to change the hotkey that starts and stops recording the video while playing a game this feature is supported in. Below the button is displayed the current key binding. In the screenshot to the right a custom key binding has been set on a localized keyboard layout.
Next is a drop-down box Frames per second. This is used to control the rate on which Xfire stores the video data to the video file. Note that as of now the game will also be limited to run on this FPS rate while video recording is active. The lower this value is, the smaller is the produced file size but the game play also suffers from less frames being drawn in a second. In contrary this value should never been higher than what the system can produce. Setting Xfire to record 100 frames per second when the computer can only produce 50 frames per second will result in a bad quality and laggy video.
Note that the video recording itself causes some strain to processing power, so the maximum FPS rate the system could do is lower during recording, so on a computer where 60 FPS is the max rate one gets in a game, the video capture should not be set to 60 FPS as it will be very likely that the computer is not able to produce that frame rate while video recording is enabled. Rather 30 FPS should be used in that case.
To the right of the FPS rate is two radio buttons, Full-size and Half-size. These control the resolution the video is saved in. Selecting Full-size makes the recorded video file to have the exact same resolution the game was running in. For example if the game was running at 1024x768 mode, the video file would also result being in 1024x768 resolution. This setting is great for quality but needs much more processing power and creates four time as big video files than Half-size option does. The later mode cuts both width and height of the video to half of the game. For example when the game is on 1024x768 resolution, half-size video would have 512x384 resolution.
If the Capture cursor checkbox is enabled, then the default mouse cursor, if visible, will also be recorded on the video file. If this box is unchecked, then only the game graphics are recorded and the mouse cursor will not be recorded, even if it was visible to the user while recording.
Note that if the mouse cursor is invisible, for example when playing FPS games, it is not visible in the recorded video even if Capture cursor was enabled. Also custom mouse cursors by the game, those that are not controlled by the drivers directly, are immune of this setting and will be recorded regardless of the state of this checkbox.
Flashback Capture Options
Flashback video capture is only available when Live broadcasting option is disabled. If this mode is available to be used, the checkbox Enable Flashback Capture is used to toggle this feature on and off. When this feature is enabled, live broadcasting option cannot be used.
Flashback video capture is a feature in Xfire that keeps recording video constantly, holding the video data for the past few seconds in RAM. When the video recording is activated, the recording starts from what happened a few seconds ago as that is already captured in RAM. The option Flashback Memory Usage controls how much memory is reserved for the feature, which in turn affects how long back in the past the feature can save video.
Here is a table listing how long back in the past Xfire can remember the game play with different Frames per second and Flashback Memory Usage settings:
| Setting | Frames | 25 fps | 30 fps | 60 fps | 100 fps |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Default | 150 | 6.0 s | 5.0 s | 2.5 s | 1.5 s |
| High | 300 | 12.0 s | 10.0 s | 5.0 s | 3.0 s |
| Higher | 450 | 18.0 s | 15.0 s | 7.5 s | 4.5 s |
| Highest | 600 | 24.0 s | 20.0 s | 10.0 s | 6.0 s |
Audio Capture Options
To capture audio in videos, the checkbox Record sound must be checked. If this option is not checked, then no audio is recorded on the video files.
Xfire uses Windows sound API to record audio, so the sound hardware and its drivers must support recording played back audio. The Audio Device drop-down box lists all the audio devices Xfire gets from Windows. Select the device where you want to record the sound from, usually this should be the same device through which the game plays its sounds.
Based on the Audio Device choice the Audio Mixer drop-down box is populated with the different sound sources the device supports. If this box is empty, then the selected audio device does not provide any sound input mixers. If this box is disabled like in the screenshot on top of this document, then the audio device does not support selecting a single Audio Mixer.
If you are able to select the mixer, then it should usually be Stereo Mix, What you hear or Wave, depending on how the selected sound device manufacturer has named the mixers. For more information about configuring the audio capture options, see Help:Video sound troubleshooting.
