However, it appears you use Vista
Well firstly, I don't use Vista its just a skin :P
Sorry to hear you're having trouble. I'm sure the sample video you posted stutters because your hard drive simply could not keep up with capture demands: full-res, 60fps, Uncompressed video requires an absolutely mammoth datarate. This explains why the game played fine in realtime, but the resulting video came out bad.
The drive I'm recording to is a 500GB WD AAKS, its pretty damn fast, and I'm sure that's not the problem, as firstly, I record with fraps with no problem and that spits out the gigabytes. Secondly, I have tried doing it at very low quality DivX on the fly and it's still jerky (using 4core encoding, so the cpu aint slowing it down). And thirdly, I've tried all 3 of my HDDs and the frame rate is the same across them all.
With VirtualDub you really don't need to exceed 30fps. Anything greater will begin to seriously bog the system and will probably be frames that you discard in post-processing anyway, so you're just losing performance and disk space.
I upped the FPS from 30 to 60 just to see if it made any difference as i know some games look really poor at only 30fps, but it looked exactly the same.
You mentioned trying different codecs. What settings have you tried with the PicVideo MJPEG codec that I reference in the guide?
Well, not PicVideo, no. The link you have was going at 5kb/s and I couldn't be bothered to wait, so I .... "found" one called "Morgan Multimedia M-JPEG" which I'm sure is practically identical, just made by someone else. Here's a screenshot...
It shares a lot of the same settings as your one.
Note in VirtualDub on the right it's showing my last test record. 7fps average. This happens in the desktop with no game running, or with a game running, windowed or fullscreen. It never breaks 7fps. The harddrive is hardly being stressed, and neither is my CPU or anything else. So I really don't know. The only thing I can think of is that it doesn't like having 2 screens active. I have to manually put in 1680x1050 rather than "Screen" as it tries to record both screens (2560x1050)........ I've just tried disabling my second monitor and setting it to 'screen' and the frame rate is still the same.
The hotkey program should have no affect on the actual recording process.
I didn't use the hotkey program simply because I couldn't be arsed. No point installing everything to make the task easier, only to find that the task itself doesn't work properly (which is what happened! :P)
And I've tried many more games, not just CSS. But the fact that the frame rate is so low even on the desktop shows its not something that's just being borked by games.
Now I know you're gonna say 'download the codec you linked', but it runs at 5-7fps on ANY game ANY desktop usage with ANY codec at ANY specified frame rate, so I seriously doubt having the PicVideo codec is going to be fine, as you have tried recording to XviD or the Xfire codec and been fine with it, yet mine still fails.
I be stumped! :!: