CamStudio Support Forum

In my experience, I normally get that error because the codec's settings are in some form of conflict.

For instance, I can't record anything with DivX and have the audio disabled - I get the same error.

But if I enable record audio from microphone - it works.

FYI, the CamStudio Lossless Codec isn't good for recording screen activity that has a LOT of movement -
you need "lossy" compression like DivX, XViD or x264/h264.

My current DivX (6.8.5) settings that work are:

[MAIN TAB]
1080HD Profile
Encoding Preset = 1
1-pass - 6000kbps

Everything else as default.

[VIDEO OPTIONS IN CAMSTUDIO]
Quality = 85
Keyframes = Every 120 frames
Capture Frames Every = 33 frames
Playback rate = 30 frames per second

Auto Adjust = unchecked

HTH

Cheers

Nick :o)

i had this exact error the SECOND time i tried to use the Xvid MPEG4 codec.. but not the first time!!?? i did a google search for the error message phrase and found this:
http://youtube.jimmyr.com/tutorials/Kiug3H3c4gk.php
which is an AWESOME video tutorial about this program; further down in the comments someone had this exact problem with the Divx codec, and was told to....
MAKE SURE THE WIDTH AND HEIGHT you select are divisible by two!! i tried this with xvid, and it worked!! (i have no idea why..)
so when you are selecting the area, just make sure it is divisible by 2

@nick:
I tried settings provided by you and it worked. But I want file size to be small so that I can record video tutorials and upload them on youtube. Could you please tell me which settings I should change in order to have a small file size.

Note: I am doing full screen recording to do video tutorials.


Thank you

--
Chetan

> full screen recording
> upload them on youtube

These two do not generally go hand in hand. Going full-screen you're going to end up with a large file size unless your willing to deal with a large quality loss, but keep in mind YouTube does accept file sizes up to 1 GiB now.

What is you screen resolution currently set to when recording?

@brandished:
Thanks for your reply. My current screen resolution is 1920 * 1080, recently I found a tool called Sizer which can resize my window to a specific size which is cool. I want to use camstudio to create some video tutorials for different applications. Could you please tell me the optimum setting. Or, what screen resolution you will recommend. I don't want to have a file bigger than 20 MB for a 30 minute video.
Note: Auto panning is not a solution for me as I want to show the entire application and then I can zoom to a specific area during recording.

Glad the settings worked.

I think you're going to have a tough time end up with a 20 MB video for 30 minutes recording time, even at smaller resolutions like 640 x 480.

My advice would be to minimize mouse movement, scrolling, zooming - in fact any other movement, maybe pausing/restarting the video instead.

Even doing that I think you're going to be pushing it to get down to 20MB - unless you use a much higher compression, and then you risk losing overall quality.

I'll be interested in seeing how you get on.

Cheers

Nick

Seems my previous post was eaten :(
Anyways, I can't remember my whole post, but I'll try to summarize:

If you're recording a screencast for YouTube, it's not really worthwhile to record a 30 minute long video as YouTube rejects anything over 10 minutes (unless you have some type of special contract) and recording at a resolution over 1280x720 isn't worthwhile either as anything over that will be resized anyways. For this reason I usually just use the "fixed region" option and try to fit what ever I'm recording inside the square and break the recording up into 10 minute sections. Also, as Nick stated, fitting 30 minutes of video to a filesize under 20mb is going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible without a huge quality loss. This isn't a reasonable goal anyway if you're uploading to YouTube, as everything you give it will be re-encoded (regardless of the codec settings used) and reduce in quality.

If I plan on uploading something to YouTube, I typically aim for something between 10~30MB per minute as YouTube allows for up to 1GB. The final file size for the video will usually be over 100mb for a 9~10 minute clip and the file takes a long time to upload, but the final quality of the video quality is very good even after YouTube gets done re-encoding it.