Overview
How to Set up WM Capture
How to Record Your First Video
How to Record DVD's
Playing your Recorded Videos
Adjusting the Volume
Settings Guide
Troubleshooting

Overview

Welcome to WM Capture 2.0, the worlds first high-speed on-screen video recorder. With WM Capture, you can turn anything you see on your PC's screen into a high quality video file you can play anywhere.

WM Capture is especially well suited for recording:

• Copy Protected Video
• DVD's
• Streaming Web Cams
• Webinars
• Screen Capture Videos
• And any other video you can't capture.

High Quality Recordings

Capturing and compressing on-screen video in real time can require a lot of your PC's CPU power. WM Capture is specially designed for this task, as it uses special high quality MPEG-2 codecs that give perfect looking recordings of videos without freezing up your PC.

Convenient

To make it easy to capture a portion of your screen, WM Capture can often automatically locate the region of your screen where video will be played. Or, you can choose to mark an area of the screen manually by moving markers yourself. Either way, setting up your recording area is a snap.

System Requirements

• Windows XP-SP2, 2000, or Vista (Mac OK with Bootcamp or Parallels installed)
• CPU Speed: 1.5 GHz minimum (dual core recommended)
• RAM memory: 512 MB or higher
• Recommended: Sound Card with a recording line (Stereo Mix, Master Volume, Wave Out Mix, What U Hear or similar)

How to Set up WM Capture

The first time you run WM Capture, you'll need to make sure you can record audio and video properly. To start, you'll be asked how audio is to be recorded like this:

Next, you'll see the Audio test screen:

WM Capture will make it's best guess as to what the audio settings should be, but you can override them if you like. Once the Audio Source and Input are selected, click Test to ensure you can record audio. After a few seconds, if the test is successful, click OK to save the audio settings.

The Settings dialog will appear next. Click the Recommended Settings button to pick a configuration that most resembles your system and recording needs:

To make subsequent changes, just click the Settings button. The Settings dialog appears as shown:

How to Record Your First Video

Once the audio and video parameters are set, you can focus on recording videos. First, you need to mark a region of the screen to record as a video, and then you can start, stop or pause recording.

Important Note: In almost every situation, you don't need to record the entire screen to get the best video quality. Most video sources broadcast at no more than 640x480 pixels, and then up-scale the video to fit a full screen. This means that you can record at 100% (rather than 200% or full-screen), and get great quality. Plus, recording from a smaller video rectangle ensures that WM Capture uses less CPU power, and this makes smaller files and greatly reduces the chances of dropped frames and choppy recordings.

Marking a Recording Region

Using Get Window

The easiest way to mark a region is to use the Get Window function. Here's how:

1. Click Get Window.
2. Move the mouse over the window you'd like to record from. As you move the mouse, the recording window will be highlighted.
3. Once your window is highlighted, click the mouse, and the region is set. It's that easy!

You can often find a Windows Media Player video window this way, or even locate an application window to record demo videos from. You can also drag the markers to adjust the recording region. Click Home on the WM Capture main window to remove the marker display.

Manually Marking a Region

You can also manually drag the markers from WM Capture to the upper left and lower right parts of the recording region. This may be necessary if WM Capture can't locate the video window, or if you'd like to record a region not defined by a window.

To manually mark a region:

1. Click Show Markers. The current position of the markers appears.
2. Go to the upper-left marker, and drag it with the mouse to the new top-left corner.
3. Repeat with the lower-right marker.

Recording

Once you've marked an area to capture, it's easy to record from it. Here's how:

Starting Recording

To start a recording, press the Record button. In a moment, the region you selected will be recorded as a video. As you're recording, the Record button turns into a Stop button, and Play becomes Pause.

Hint: You can also start recording by using the keyboard. Press Ctrl+F12 to start and stop recording when WM Capture is open.

Pause and Continue

If you'd like to pause recording, click the Pause button. Click Restart to resume recording.

Stop Recording

Click Stop to end the recording. Your recorded file is saved.

How to Record DVD's

Recording from DVD's is easy using WM Capture. Here's how to do it:

1. Insert the DVD into your PC, and play it using Windows Media Player.
2. Once the DVD starts playing, resize the Windows Media Player window to approximately 1/4 of your screen. The size of the video window should be as close to 640x480 as possible.
3. Click Get Window in WM Capture, and move the marker over the video window in Windows Media Player.
4. Once the video window is highlighted, click the mouse. This sets the recording region.
5. Click Record, and play your video.
6. Click Stop when finished.

Note: You are legally allowed to record clips from DVD's for your own personal use. WM Capture is not intended to be a way to circumvent copy protection on copyrighted DVD's.

Playing your Recorded Videos

Once you've finished recording, you can see your last recorded video by clicking Play.

To see all your recordings, click the View button. The View screen appears:

Double click a file to play it, or select and right-click to play, rename or delete a recording.

Click the Open Output Folder menu option to open a file explorer window for your recorded video files.

Adjusting the Volume

After doing your first recording, play it back once and check the volume level. If it is too loud or too soft, you can use the Volume slider on the main screen to increase or decrease the recorded volume.

Settings Guide

This section is a reference for the Settings dialog:

Recommended Settings: Use this button to automatically configure the Audio Settings and Video Settings for the speed of your PC and desired output quality.

Audio Settings: Set the Audio Bitrate as the quality for recorded audio. In general, 64 Kbps is fine for most recording, but higher bit rates are better, especially when music is involved. Click Audio Setup / Test to locate or manually set the best audio recording inputs on your PC.

Video Settings: Choose the Video Bit Rate, Frames per second, and Video Format (MPEG-2 or Windows Media). The Recommended Settings button will do this for you, but you can manually adjust these parameters here if you like.

Disable Video Acceleration: Use this option if you record Windows Media Player or Real Player windows on Windows XP or lower versions. Otherwise keep this option unchecked.

Recording Options:

• Record Audio: Turn on or off audio recording. This is useful for making "silent movies".
• Record Video: Turn this option off if you want to make WM Capture into an audio-only recorder.
• Audio Compression: Turn this on to make smaller recorded files. However, enabling this option requires more CPU power, and may affect the quality of your video if your PC isn't fast enough to handle this.
• Keep WM Capture on Top: Ensures the WM Capture window is never hidden by other programs.

Recording File Size / Time: This lets you limit the time or file size for your recordings. Handy for unattended recordings.

Miscellaneous:

• Hide WM Capture when recording: Makes the WM Capture window disappear when recording starts. This is useful for recording full-screen video for example.
• Enable Universal Audio Driver: On some systems, there may not be a usable recording input available. The Universal Audio Driver allows you to record audio on virtually ANY system. You should select this if the Audio Test fails to locate any available recording input.
• Set Output Folder: Choose the folder on your PC where recorded files are to be saved.
• Enter/Check registration: Use this option to enter a registration code, or check your current registration information.
• Check for New Version: See if an update to WM Capture is available.
• Recording File Name Prefix: Assigns a prefix for saved file names. For example, if this is set to "My Video", then files are saved as "My Video1.wmv", "My Video2.wmv", etc.

Troubleshooting

Video quality is choppy

To get the best quality video - especially on slower machines - try the following:

1. Go to Settings, and make sure you are using the MPEG-2 video format. You can also try one of the Recommended Settings options for slower PC's.
2. Try recording from a smaller video window by resizing your player to 1/4 of your screen, or no more than 480x640 pixels. This won't affect the video quality (since video is scaled UP from smaller sizes to fit a full-screen picture). This will require less computer power to capture, which will make for smoother videos.

I'm having trouble recording audio.

For Windows Vista: First, try enabling a recording line using the instructions here.

On some PC's, only the Universal Audio Driver will work. Go to Settings, Audio Setup/Test, and select the Universal Audio Driver. Use the Universal Audio Driver only if the Test option fails to locate a working audio recording line. Here's how the proper setting appears:

The Universal Audio Driver Option isn't working for me

To use the Universal Audio Driver, in some cases you may need to open WM Capture before opening your browser or video playback application.

The Video Window is all black when playing back the recording

If this occurs, you will need to disable "hardware acceleration" on your PC. Here's how to do it:

1. Right click on your Windows desktop.
2. Select Properties in the pop-up menu.
3. In the Display Property window click Settings, Advanced, Troubleshoot.
4. Move the Hardware Acceleration slider to NONE.
5. Click Apply.
6. Click OK in the message box displayed by the video card.
7. Click OK to exit

I'm not able to play DVD's any more since installing WM Capture.

WM Capture disables the video acceleration for Windows Media Player when installed. This is required for capturing the screen section where Windows Media plays the video. Otherwise, the recording shows a black window. This feature can be activated or deactivated in WM Capture's settings "Disable Video Acceleration" check box.

Here how to re-enable video acceleration in Windows Media Player:

1. Open Windows Media Player.
2. From the menu., select Tools, Options, Performance.
3. Move the "Video Acceleration" slider to Full and click OK.

I get a "Cannot Run Graph” error message

The "Cannot Run Graph" error is related to the version of DirectX installed on your machine. You need to have version 9 or higher installed in order to run WM Capture. You should make sure you are running DirectX 9 (or 10 if your graphics card will support it) and that should take care of the problem. You can update your DirectX from Microsoft's site here.

Also, you might want to try uninstalling WM Capture, restarting your computer and re-installing it. Usually this has to be done for it to realize that the proper version of DirectX has been installed.