Review of Replay Video Capture by Applian Technologies

What if you could purchase a Windows application that does only one thing, but does it perfectly well? Replay Video Capture by Applian Technologies is such a program. Its sole mission is recording what's displayed in an area of the PC screen while capturing audio playing through the sound card. It really doesn't care what it's recording. It can be a video playing in your web browser, a DVD playing in Power DVD, your own application that you want to add voice notes to, or anything else on your screen that you want it to peer at and record.

The documentation says that best results will be obtained by sizing the source to no more than 640 x 480 pixels. Going larger than this really increases the demands on the CPU and other resources. We found that to be true. Although the program was able to record full-screen on our Vista test machine, it made us wish for a quad-core CPU.

First Run

When started for the first time, Replay VC goes to a "Quick Start" support web page.

click to enlarge

Settings

Clicking "Settings" opens the Settings dialog. Although there appear to be a lot of options, you can leave most of them at their defaults. One thing you shoud do, though, is to click the "Recommended Settings" button. As shown in the middle image below, it looks at your PC and offers five choices:

• High Quality - Full Motion Videos (single core CPU)
• High Quality - Full Motion Videos (dual core CPU)
• Full Screen - (single core CPU)
• Full Screen - (dual core CPU)
• Medium Quality - Small File Size (email, Internet broadcast)

We selected High Quality - Full Motion Videos (dual core CPU), and the program filled in 1200 Kbps at 20 fps in Windows Media 9 format.

After testing some recordings, we went back and changed that to MPEG-2, 3000 Kbps, 25 fps, and MPEG-2 format, which yielded better results on our mid-range Vista Media Center test PC.

In the image below we've selected an .flv format file entitled "The Matrix Runs on Windows" that was downloaded from YouTube using YouTube Downloader. The video application is GOM Player, an excellent general purpose media player that is compatible with Vista.

This is what Replay VC looks like while it's recording.

And here's what playing the recorded video in GOM Player looks like.

In my previous jobs, I often provided documentation for software applications running on Palm OS and Windows Mobile handhelds. Sometimes I used remote control applications on the devices that allowed me to interact with and control the mobile device from my PC.

As an example of a possible business use of Replay VC, I started up SOTI Pocket Controller Pro, connected to my Windows Mobile Smartphone, and captured a video while updating Evernote.

Replay VC actually listens to the sound cards output when it records, so if I had had a microphone hooked up to the PC, I could have annotated the steps involved in doing this update. This could allow for some low-budget product demonstration videos.

The recorded file was 16.89 MB and played back perfectly.

As a final test, I tried capturing live television in Vista Media Center. This was also trouble-free, and the image below shows the playback.