Blizzard has a added new video capture feature to the Mac version of World of Warcraft. Initially, I tried it on the highest resolution setting of 1446×904.When I hit the capture button, the game slowed to a painful crawl and after a few seconds, I received an error that the setting was too high and the capture stopped. When I watched the few seconds long video that was captured, it was as jerky and rough as the game play. I worked my way down the settings, getting the same error, until I got to 640×400. At that setting, it works perfectly, without affecting performance, and not giving me an error. After the capture is complete, it compresses the video while you play. This process didn’t affect the performance of the game either.

Here’s a video of a dancing Ogre in Negrand. He and his friends were killed by me shortly after this video was captured. There is no option for 480×300 which is what this video is. I had to capture at 640×400 and convert using iMovie.

I posted this video using DreamHost’s Free Flash Media Tools. They are very easy to use and work great. To simplify the process of getting the video into the article, I installed the AFC FLV Player plugin. It has one dependency, the AFC Plug System. You have to create an account on their site, which I wasn’t crazy about.