If you were lazy to read the Wow PTR patch 2.2.0 Patch Notes you may have missed that Mac OS X players can now record video gameplay natively. Check this out and drool.

  • Mac Movie Capture: the Mac client can now capture in-game video to QuickTime movie files using a configurable choice of codec (H.264, Motion JPEG, or Pixlet), resolution, and frame rate. Two new entries have been added to the Key Bindings dialog for start/stop recording and for cancellation of a recording. For more detailed configuration options please see the Mac Options panel in game. Mac OS X 10.4.9 and QuickTime 7.1.6 or better are required. Not all machines have enough performance to smoothly capture video at high frame rates; end user experimentation will be required to find appropriate settings for each system.

/hands you a napkin

This is what Tigerclaw, Blizzard Mac Department, commented about this feature:

Tigerclaw: “We have built video recording into WoW 2.2.0 on Mac, you can try it out on the PTR starting today. See the sticky thread on it.

By all means we want to hear your feedback on this feature and where we should go with it. I know there is some internal interest in bringing comparable functionality to the Windows client, maybe you can give us feedback on what you would want out of it that would make it your preferred choice for capturing.

To some extent we considered video capture on Windows a well solved problem due to the widespread usage of FRAPS, and we wanted to bring the Mac client some improvement in that area (it also happens to be a nice improvement for internal testers filing bug reports in a lot of situations). But if you feel we can do better or go farther than what is already prevalent on Windows, we can use that perspective.

We have a checkbox you can set to control whether any UI is included in the movie or not.

It helps that we draw all the game stuff before we draw any of the UI stuff each frame. If there is strong demand for the feature on the Windows client we will act accordingly.

One of the open questions there though is, what video codec software would be suitable ? Would this feature be appealing on Windows if QuickTime was required? (We leverage QuickTime on Mac because it is a default install and has some good codecs built in like H264 & MJPEG).

I know there is interest internally in bringing this feature to Windows (and the iTunes control too). There will inevitably be times when new features that are not core game functionality show up on one platform first (G-15 keyboard LCD support on Windows, iTunes UI & Movie-Capture on Mac) and there will be times where we bring them out simultaneously (Voice Chat).

The issues with porting the newer Mac client features back to Windows revolve around manpower and scheduling on the Windows development team and not anything having to do with policy or specific technical issues. The iTunes remote and the Movie Capture feature are both under consideration for porting back to Windows, so if we could just stay focused on articulating user desires and not platform flame wars here, might be a more useful thread for us.

To some extent we’re trying to avoid making the config menus extra long, if you could nominate 2-3 add’l codecs in the default QuickTime set that would make sense (or offer critiques for the ones listed) we’d love to hear it.

Maybe we could make a config.wtf setting for more direct control too.

Chatty Blizzard Dev … so shiny!  Want to offer feedback and suggestions whether to support the Mac video capture or to request … no … implore … umm … demand a Windows in-game video capture, head over to the following forum thread that will be monitored by Blizzard.