What are the Fraps File Types? ~ Hazelfresh Live

Fraps is a powerful video-capture program that you can use to create movies of nearly any video media your computer is displaying and the program also supports screenshots and benchmarking tools. Fraps uses a total of six file types for its various features and you can view and use most of them with basic programs on your computer.

Fraps saves its videos as audio video interleave files, or "AVI" files. This is a file type created by Microsoft and it was actually the first audio-video file type for the Windows operating system. Although AVIs can be compressed so they don't take up too much space on your hard drive, Fraps does not compress them because there isn't enough time available to record the video and encode it at once. This is why many of Fraps' video files are so large, especially if you record them at a high resolution.

If you want to test the performance of your computer while it's recording with Fraps, you can use the benchmark option to create files detailing the frames per second, the time stamp for every frame and overview information, including the total frame count and average frame values. Fraps saves these three files with the term "fps," "frametimes" and "minmaxavg" in the file names, respectively. The file type for all three is comma-separated value files, or "CSV" files. You can view these files in a spreadsheet program or in a word processor.

Fraps also allows you to take screenshots when it's recording; these are saved in one of four file types: bitmap ("BMP"), JPEG ("JPG"), portable network graphics ("PNG") or TARGA ("TGA"). The first three file types are very common and nearly any image program can open them. Many image programs are not compatible with TARGA files, though you can open them with programs like Photoshop or GIMP.

Because of the large size of many video files, you may want to compress them and perhaps convert them to another file type. A quality file converter will be able to reduce the file size with minimal or no loss to the video's quality. You could use Windows Movie Maker, which will compress the file and convert it to a Windows Media Video ("WMV") file type. Other options you may want to consider are programs like Handbrake or Hamster Free Video Converter.

Source: http://www.ehow.com/info_12175209_fraps-file-types.html