Working on a distributed team means that often the best way to share new results is via video captures of simulations. Previously I would do this by dumping uncompressed frames from OpenGL to disk, and then compressing with FFmpeg. I prefer this over tools like Fraps because it gives more control over compression quality, and has no watermarking or time limits.
The problem with this method is simply that saving uncompressed frames generates a large amount of data that quickly fills up the write cache and slows down the whole system during capture, it also makes FFmpeg disk bound on reads during encoding.
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