Replay Video Capture 5 User Guide

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Overview
• New with Version 5
• How to Set up Replay Video Capture on Win XP
• How to Record Your First Video
• How to Take a Frame Snapshot
• How to Record DVD's
• Playing your Recorded Videos
• How to Schedule a Recording
• Adjusting the Volume
• Settings Guide
• Troubleshooting

Overview

Welcome to Replay Video Capture, the fastest high-speed on-screen video recorder ever made. With Replay Video Capture, you can turn anything you see on your PC's screen into a high quality video file you can play anywhere.

Replay Video Capture is especially well suited for recording:

• Copy Protected Video
• DVD's
• Streaming Web Cams
• Webinars
• Screen Capture Videos
• And any other video you can't capture.

High Quality Recordings

Capturing and compressing on-screen video in real time can require a lot of your PC's CPU power. Replay Video Capture is specially designed for this task, as it uses special high quality MPEG-2 codecs that give perfect looking recordings of videos without freezing up your PC.

Convenient

To make it easy to capture a portion of your screen, Replay Video Capture can often automatically locate the region of your screen where video will be played. Or, you can choose to mark an area of the screen manually by moving markers yourself. Either way, setting up your recording area is a snap.

System Requirements

• Windows XP-SP2, 2000, or Vista (Mac OK with Bootcamp or Parallels installed)
• CPU Speed: 1.5 GHz minimum (dual core recommended)
• RAM memory: 512 MB or higher
• Recommended: Sound Card with a recording line (Stereo Mix, Master Volume, Wave Out Mix, What U Hear or similar)

New with Version 5

• DVD ready videos: You can now record videos straight to DVD format, ready to be burned on disc. This eliminates hours of conversion or transcoding.
• Scheduled recordings: Video recordings can now be started automatically at specified times and days.
• Dual audio recording: Two audio sources can be simultaneously recorded. For example, you can now record your voice over a video with audio track.
• Dual monitor support: You can use a second monitor to play/record videos while using the first monitor to do other things.
• Video stills: You can take video snapshots, saved as 32-bit BMP files, while recording or pausing videos, full screen or selected windows.
• Improved video quality: The new Enhanced mode allows video frames rates up to 50 frames per second. This is particularly important when recording in DVD format.
• More video codecs and video formats: MPEG-4 and DVD codecs can now be used as default video formats along with MPEG-2 and Windows Media. Replay Video can also use other video codecs already installed in your computer (ffdshow, DivX, Xvid, h264, FLV) and save these files as an AVI.
• Pause is now available for all video formats.
• File sizes larger than 4 GB are displayed correctly
• Replay Video Capture can be used on non-administrative accounts.

How to Set up Replay Video Capture on Win XP

The first time you run Replay Video Capture on a Windows XP machine, you'll need to make sure you can record audio and video properly. For Windows Vista and Windows 7, this is done automatically.

To start, you'll be asked how audio is to be recorded like this:

Next, you'll see the Audio test screen:

Replay Video Capture will make it's best guess as to what the audio settings should be, but you can override them if you like. Once the Audio Source and Input are selected, click Test to ensure you can record audio. After a few seconds, if the test is successful, click OK to save the audio settings.

The Settings dialog will appear next. Click the Recommended Settings button to pick a configuration that most resembles your system and recording needs:

To make subsequent changes, just click the Settings button. The Settings dialog appears as shown:

How to Record Your First Video

Once the audio and video parameters are set, you can focus on recording videos. First, you need to mark a region of the screen to record as a video, and then you can start, stop or pause recording.

Important Note: In almost every situation, you don't need to record the entire screen to get the best video quality. Most video sources broadcast at no more than 640x480 pixels, and then up-scale the video to fit a full screen. This means that you can record at 100% (rather than 200% or full-screen), and get great quality. Plus, recording from a smaller video rectangle ensures that Replay Video Capture uses less CPU power, and this makes smaller files and greatly reduces the chances of dropped frames and choppy recordings.

Marking a Recording Region

Using Get Window

The easiest way to mark a region is to use the Get Window function. Here's how:

1. Click Get Window.
2. Move the mouse over the window you'd like to record from. As you move the mouse, the recording window will be highlighted.
3. Once your window is highlighted, click the mouse, and the region is set. It's that easy!

You can often find a Windows Media Player video window this way, or even locate an application window to record demo videos from. You can also drag the markers to adjust the recording region. Click Home on the Replay Video Capture main window to remove the marker display.

Manually Marking a Region

You can also manually drag the markers from Replay Video Capture to the upper left and lower right parts of the recording region. This may be necessary if Replay Video Capture can't locate the video window, or if you'd like to record a region not defined by a window.

To manually mark a region:

1. Click Show Markers. The current position of the markers appears.
2. Go to the upper-left marker, and drag it with the mouse to the new top-left corner.
3. Repeat with the lower-right marker.

Recording

Once you've marked an area to capture, it's easy to record from it. Here's how:

Starting Recording

To start a recording, press the Record button. In a moment, the region you selected will be recorded as a video. As you're recording, the Record button turns into a Stop button, and Play becomes Pause.

Hint: You can also start recording by using the keyboard. Press Ctrl+F12 to start and stop recording when Replay Video Capture is open.

Pause and Continue

If you'd like to pause recording, click the Pause button. Click Restart to resume recording.

Stop Recording

Click Stop to end the recording. Your recorded file is saved.

How to Take a Frame Snapshot

Replay Video Capture 5 lets you take a photo of any frame of your video as it plays. This also works with capturing a part of your screen. here's how to do it:

1. Mark the area you want to capture.
2. Click the Still button.
3. Your photo is saved as a BMP image file, and opens in your default editor for these files.

How to Record DVD's

Recording from DVD's is easy using Replay Video Capture. Here's how to do it:

1. Insert the DVD into your PC, and play it using Windows Media Player.
2. Once the DVD starts playing, resize the Windows Media Player window to approximately 1/4 of your screen. The size of the video window should be as close to 640x480 as possible.
3. Click Get Window in Replay Video Capture, and move the marker over the video window in Windows Media Player.
4. Once the video window is highlighted, click the mouse. This sets the recording region.
5. Click Record, and play your video.
6. Click Stop when finished.

Note: You are legally allowed to record clips from DVD's for your own personal use. Replay Video Capture is not intended to be a way to circumvent copy protection on copyrighted DVD's.

Hints on how to record high quality DVD videos:

You need to make sure that your computer can sustain a recording frame rate of at least 29.97 for NTSC, 25 fps for PAL. XP dual core computers with CPU speed of 2.0 GHz or higher can easily do this. On Vista and Windows 7 you may have to set Windows to "Best Performance" mode instead of "Best Appearance" as shown under Video Capture Options. To check if the DVD frame rate can be sustained, make a short two minute recording, use DVD video format, 6000 kbps, 29.97 fps, 720x480 size. When recording Replay Video shows the actual achieved frame rate next to the preset rate in the Status window (for example 29/27 or 29/31 - the first number is the preset rate 29.97 the second is the actual achieved frame rate). Make sure the actual frame rate does not go much lower. If this happens consistently you can still record DVD's but the video quality may not be as good especially for high motion scenes.

The recorded DVD file needs to be "authored". The authoring creates the DVD folders VIDEO_TS / AUDIO_TS and usually takes a few seconds to a few minutes. It can be done automatically when recording is finished. The DVD folders can be burned as Data Disc using any DVD burner software (a two hour movie takes about 15 minutes to burn.) The recorded DVD does not have a menu so it begins playing when inserted into the DVD player. The DVD video has chapters set every 10 minutes such that the DVD can be quickly scanned in 10 minutes increments.

To maintain a reasonable frame rate of at least 20 fps even on slower computers, please make sure:

• The recording video size must be smaller than 1/4 of your screen.
• Do not use the Full Screen videos, always try to make the video window smaller.
• If the video plays in a web page, use the Zoom function of the browser to make the web page and the video smaller.

Playing your Recorded Videos

Once you've finished recording, you can see your last recorded video by clicking Play.

To see all your recordings, click the View button. The View screen appears:

Double click a file to play it, or select and right-click to play, rename or delete a recording.

Click the Open Output Folder menu option to open a file explorer window for your recorded video files.

Note: On some systems, you may need to install ffdshow to play MPEG-2 files recorded by Replay Video Capture.

How to Schedule a Recording

You can make Replay Video Capture open a program or a web page, and start recording automatically at a preset time or according to a schedule. Here's how to do it:

1. Click Settings, then Scheduler from the top menu, then Open Now. The Scheduler appears:
   
   
   
   
2. Within the scheduler are these options:
   
   File Name: What name to use when saving the file.
   
   URL / File Path: What URL to open if recording a video from the web.
   
   Program Name: What EXE file to open if recording from a Windows application.
   
   Window Position: The coordinates of the window to record from (top, left, bottom, right).
   Start Time: What time of day to start recording.
   
   Duration: How many hours:minutes:seconds to record.
   
   Date: Pick the starting date to record from.
   
   Repeat: Pick the days of the week to record regularly broadcast programs. Select Once if you will be recording just once. Pick Daily if you will be recording seven days a week.
   
   
   
3. The Scheduler also has these action buttons:
   
   Enable: Start running the scheduler so that scheduled items are recorded.
   
   Disable: Stop recording scheduled items.
   
   Save Schedule: Save your scheduled item.
   
   View: View all scheduled items.
   
   Test URL: Open the URL to make sure the program to record you want appears.
   
   Schedule Now: Insert the current time and date into the schedule parameters

Adjusting the Volume

After doing your first recording, play it back once and check the volume level. If it is too loud or too soft, you can use the Volume slider on the main screen to increase or decrease the recorded volume.

Settings Guide

This section is a reference for the Settings dialog:

Recommended Settings: Use this button to automatically configure the Audio Settings and Video Settings for the speed of your PC and desired output quality.

Audio Settings: Set the Audio Bit rate as the quality for recorded audio. In general, 64 Kbps is fine for most recording, but higher bit rates are better, especially when music is involved. Click Audio Setup / Test to locate or manually set the best audio recording inputs on your PC.

Video Settings: Choose the Video Bit Rate, Frames per second, and Video Format (MPEG-2 or Windows Media). The Recommended Settings button will do this for you, but you can manually adjust these parameters here if you like.

Disable Video Acceleration: Use this option if you record Windows Media Player or Real Player windows on Windows XP or lower versions. Otherwise keep this option unchecked.

Recording Options:

• Record Audio: Turn on or off audio recording. This is useful for making "silent movies".
• Record Video: Turn this option off if you want to make Replay Video Capture into an audio-only recorder.

• Using the Set Top Window Feature: Replay Video Capture records exactly what it can see on your screen. When enabled, the Set Top Window option will allow you to keep the video window you are recording always in the forefront. Any window that appears while you are recording will pass behind the active recording window. There are some requirements for this feature to work well:

  1. Small video windows or pop-out video windows work best. Keep the window that you are recording sized to about 1/4 of the desktop area or less.
  2. This feature requires at least a dual core processor.
     
     
• Audio Compression: Turn this on to make smaller recorded files. However, enabling this option requires more CPU power, and may affect the quality of your video if your PC isn't fast enough to handle this.
• Keep Replay Video Capture on Top: Ensures the Replay Video Capture window is never hidden by other programs.

Recording File Size / Time: This lets you limit the recording time or file size for each recording. If both values are set, then whichever limit is reached first will cause recording to stop automatically.

Miscellaneous:

• Hide Replay Video Capture when recording: Makes the Replay Video Capture window disappear when recording starts. This is useful for recording full-screen video for example.
• Enable Universal Audio Driver: On some systems, there may not be a usable recording input available. The Universal Audio Driver allows you to record audio on virtually ANY system. You should select this if the Audio Test fails to locate any available recording input.
• Set Output Folder: Choose the folder on your PC where recorded files are to be saved.
• Enter/Check registration: Use this option to enter a registration code, or check your current registration information.
• Check for New Version: See if an update to Replay Video Capture is available.
• Recording File Name Prefix: Assigns a prefix for saved file names. For example, if this is set to "My Video", then files are saved as "My Video1.wmv", "My Video2.wmv", etc.

Troubleshooting

I can't play MPEG-2 files created by Replay Video Capture

You may need to install something called ffdshow to play these. Ffdshow contains a MPEG-2 decoder. You can install ffdshow from here.

Video quality is choppy

To get the best quality video - especially on slower machines - try the following:

1. Go to Settings, and make sure you are using the MPEG-2 video format. You can also try one of the Recommended Settings options for slower PC's.
2. Try recording from a smaller video window by resizing your player to 1/4 of your screen, or no more than 480x640 pixels. This won't affect the video quality (since video is scaled UP from smaller sizes to fit a full-screen picture). This will require less computer power to capture, which will make for smoother videos.

I'm having trouble recording audio and receive an error. This fix applies to those running Windows Vista Only. Use this fix if you receive one of these error messages:

With Windows Media selected the error message is - Error: "Cannot connect SndCap to ASF Encoder"
With MPEG 2 selected the error message is - Error: "Cannot connect audio to encoder"

1. Close Replay Video Capture
2. Right-Click the speaker icon in the Windows Task Bar and choose Playback Devices.
3. Click the Speakers button.
4. Click Properties then Advanced. Open the drop-down list and select either 16 bit 44100 Hz or 16 bit 48000 Hz option.
5. Click OK.
6. Click Configure. Under Audio Channels select stereo.
7. Click Next to exit.

I'm having trouble recording audio.

On some PC's, only the Universal Audio Driver will work. Go to Settings, Audio Setup/Test, and select the Universal Audio Driver. Use the Universal Audio Driver only if the Test option fails to locate a working audio recording line.

The Universal Audio Driver Option isn't working for me

To use the Universal Audio Driver, in some cases you may need to open Replay Video Capture before opening your browser or video playback application.

The Video Window is all black when playing back the recording

If this occurs, you will need to disable "hardware acceleration" on your PC. Here's how to do it:

1. Right click on your Windows desktop.
2. Select Properties in the pop-up menu.
3. In the Display Property window click Settings, Advanced, Troubleshoot.
4. Move the Hardware Acceleration slider to NONE.
5. Click Apply.
6. Click OK in the message box displayed by the video card.
7. Click OK to exit