Must. Have. More. Storage.
Yeah, I know — yet another rant about storage. I can’t help it because I have this basic compulsion that if it is possible to capture data it should be captured and stored.
A couple weeks ago I got a good deal on a 120gb SATA drive and installed that in my home machine (which already had 650gb total storage). Why?
Well, I purchased a copy of 3d game utility Fraps. Fraps adds an overlay to 3D games that displays the current frames/second that a game is running at. In addition, it records in-game video and audio to uncompressed AVI files, which is what I bought it for.
The problem is that an uncompressed AVI files take up a lot of space. Saving full-screen video of Unreal Tournament 2004 at 20fps requires about 1.3 gigabytes/minute. Plus to reduce the performance hit, you really want to write the files to an internal drive rather than an external drive. Copy the files to an external drive later and then convert to MPEG-2 for storage.
I get surprisingly good results, btw. I have a crappy NVidia PCI card since I’m still waiting for decent PCI-Express cards to hit the market (by the end of this month apparently, thank goodness). But running UT2004 at 1024×768 and capturing full motion video, I’m still getting an average of about 35fps. With a real 3D card I suspect that would be in the 45fps range.
Tags: Data Storage
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Sep 11th, 2004
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