Recording Game Videos on Windows 7

This is just a quick note to remind myself how I did this.

• Hypercam2 is a good, free, video recorder that can cope with recording game videos. It’s freely available from http://www.hyperionics.com/hc/downloads.asp – just make sure when you install it you don’t tick on the spyware toolbar installation options.
• My motherboard has a 5.1 digital soundcard built in. However the only way I can record off the soundcard is to plug in a standard audio cable from the speaker out (green) to the microphone in (orange).
• The soundcard switches off the headphone output when it detects a speaker attached to the speaker out, so you have to go to the recording options in Windows 7 and right click on the microphone in. It will give you an option to ‘Monitor this input using the headphones’ – which will allow you to listen to anything coming into the microphone socket through the headphone socket on the front on my PC.
• In hypercam, set the sound to record from the default input device, set the frame rate to 10/10
• Record using the ‘select window to record from’ option, select the game window, and use the F2 button to start and stop the recording.
• The video will be output in AVI format, but you can transcode or convert it into a quicktime MOV file for editing in iMovie, or you can use windows movie editor, which is free and quite good.