First and foremost, if you're going to be doing a lot of recording, you should familiarize yourself with VirtualDub. It's a pretty handy tool for anyone who dabbles in AVI recording. It also will be our main capture program of choice, conveniently.

For the purposes of recording, I will be using an older version of VirtualDub, Version 1.8.6, as this is in my experience, the best recorder. Open the zip file and extract it into its own folder. VirtualDub.exe is the program you'll be running.

You should take a little time to familiarize yourself with VirtualDub if you've never used it before.

The functions you will use the most in this guide are 'Compression' in both the 'Video' and 'Audio' menus, and the 'Save as Avi' selection from the 'File' menu. It is very important to choose a video compression format, because if you do not, VirtualDub will save the avi as an uncompressed file, which will be Massive.

Now that you've downloaded VirtualDub, you'll be needing at least three specific codecs for your system. If you've installed any codec packs in the past you may already have some of them installed:
1. HuffYUV 2.1.1
2. Lame ACM MP3 Codec 3.98
3. The X264 VFW (Video For Windows) Codec.

Any codecs that come as .exe files will be easy to install, but for the Lame ACM codec do the following: Extract the files into a folder, and then right click on the .inf file and choose install.

Once you've installed all the codecs, you will have to close and re-open VirtualDub for it to recognize them in its 'Compression' fields. Excellent work, you're halfway done.

Now that we have the codecs and VirtualDub set up all nicely, it's time for the meat and potatoes of this solution: The capturing. Open up VirtualDub, and choose file, Capture AVI. This will change VirtualDub's layout entirely, but don't worry. Everything's under control.

First and foremost, everytime you come into Capture AVI, you'll need to choose File -> Set Capture File. This tells Virtualdub where to save the AVI we're going to capture. Next, is the Device menu. One of the default options with VirtualDub is ScreenCapture, and what an option it is, too.

The moment you check ScreenCapture as the device type, you will see an infinite feedback of your screen inside VirtualDub, like a hall of mirrors. If that's not the case, make sure that Video -> Overlay is checked, and get ready for some fun.

Head down to Video -> Set Custom Format, and set your size. I recommend checking the 'Use Custom Size' box at the bottom. I set mine to 1280 x 1024, because that's my monitor's resolution. Leave the Data Format at whatever it defaults to, and hit OK.

Next, let's go to Video -> Source, not to be confused with Video -> Video Source. Make sure 'Use Fixed Offset' is selected, and the X and Y coordinates are both 0. For Panning Area, select 'Entire Desktop'. This is the exploit part.

If you're using XP, checking the "Use OpenGL Hardware Acceleration" option will dramatically increase the framerate you can record at. With a 7750 Dual Core Athlon, and a GeForce GTX 260, I can record at my monitor's maximum resolution at a full 30 fps in any game, including Crysis. Mileage may vary a bit, but this is the fastest possible recording setup on XP.

If you are using Windows Vista or 7, this option will give you nothing but a black screen recorded. This is because Microsoft 'fixed' the OpenGL exploit in the DirectX architecture with DirectX 10 and up. Shame on you Microsoft.

We're almost ready to record (these settings will save themselves next time, so you won't have to do as much work.), but first we need to choose Video -> Compression, and select HuffYUV. For those of you that do not have a powerful enough PC to encode to HuffYUV in real time, I might recommend PicVideo's MJPEG codec. It is not free, but it performs very quickly without too much quality loss.

Second to last, the audio capture settings. Choose Audio -> Audio Input, and select either 'What U Hear' 'Loopback' 'Master Record' or 'Stereo Mix' from the options available to you. If none of these options are available, Citrinate's thread explains how to use Virtual Audio Cable quite well, and it's more or less the same setup here.

Last but not least, head to Capture -> Settings to set your Framerate (I recommend 30 FPS), and Capture -> Timing to finish up your setup. Once again, all these settings (Except the Capture File) will be saved automatically for future use, if VirtualDub is closed normally.

Check the box marked 'Drop Frames when...' , Uncheck 'Insert Null Frames', and set Resync mode to 'Synch video to audio by adjusting video timing. Set Audio Latency to automatic, with 1 block, and hit OK.

Presto! You're done with the setup! That only took forever, right? Don't worry, you won't have to do any of that setup again.

Finally! Now that all that hard work is over with, it's time to do what only VirtualDub and XP can do best, record your video faster than Fraps or Camstudio. A lofty claim! But behold the results for yourself. Check the Video -> Cropping setting if you're playing in a window and don't want to capture the whole screen, and then hit F5 to start capturing! Remember, every time you re-start virtualdub, you will have to set the capture file again manually.

Go ahead and do whatever it is you want to do. Recording DBO makes a nice test. When you're done, go back into the VirtualDub window and hit Escape. This should end the capture.

Go ahead and exit capture mode, and open the capture file up in Virtualdub's normal mode. You should be able to seek through the file and test it out, but remember: HuffYUV encodes pretty fast, but it takes a powerful machine to play it at full speed. The same goes for MJPEG, if you went that route. Not only that, but your file is pretty big, isn't it? Don't worry, if you want to share it, we can make it much smaller with VirtualDub. That's the next segment.

Now that you have your clip open in VirtualDub, you can use the 'Start' and 'End' marks that look like arrows that were cut in half down the middle, to select the part of the clip you want to share. Get that done, then head to Video -> Compression, and choose X264VFW, and hit configure. You want 'Single Pass - Quantizer Based'. Setting the number really low will yield high quality, but also high filesizes. I reccomend between 15 and 22, if you want to get that filesize down, but experiment yourself to see how you like the quality versus filesize. One thing is for sure, the AVI you save will be much smaller, now.

Also, go to Audio -> Compression, and select Lame MP3. CBR 128 Kbit stereo is probably your best bet. Once you have all these settings set, go ahead and File -> Save Avi (F7), and pick a name for the new file. It can't be the same as the one you have open, obviously, so choose a different one, and make sure it ends with .avi

Save it, and wait while your system converts the file to X264. You'll still need a pretty powerful system to view it if you recorded at high resolution, but it should be possible now, as opposed to the HuffYUV/MJPEG file.

Congratulations, now you have a high quality, high resolution, 30 Frames Per Second video that you can upload to youtube and have look gorgeous. Wasn't that a lot of work?