What program do you use to capture videos?

I use to use Snagit to capture but lately when trying to snag a video, the video gets choppy and lagging a little and the sound kinda skips and makes an occasional faint popping noise like static..never did this before though. The video playing on the screen is perfectly fine until you turn on snagit to record and thus when you turn it on the video gets choppy and thus makes a lousy recording. Also I use LITECAM and it does not do this but it makes too damn big of a file on short videos. Could the codecs be all screwed up? I was using XVID MPEG-4 Video Codec in snagit and this is the codec which made the smallest file size..but now videos get choppy a little. any suggestions?

i use a program named VLC

I suggest trash Snagit if it is messing up your vids...
I use imagegrabber