VirtualDub Game Recording Guide

Post by **GeneralAdmission** » 19 Sep 2008, 23:08

As requested, I have resurrected and completed my game recording guide for VirtualDub.

Guide is online now:
http://www.genadmission.com/vdubguide.html

It's rather long, so plan to spend some time reading ;) . Please share any feedback, questions, tips, and videos.

Post by **scavvenjahh** » 20 Sep 2008, 11:40

And I just registered Fraps for future video recordings :cry:

Oh wait, this looks way too complicated for my miserable brains... I can't even use VLC properly, and VirtualDub is clearly exceeding my limits. Relief ! :lol:

Nicely detailed & illustrated, great job.

Post by **Paradigm Shifter** » 20 Sep 2008, 13:11

Nice. Will give it a shot ASAP. :)

Dem Pyros · Post by **Dem Pyros** » 20 Sep 2008, 16:55

Definitely give it a try later today :D

Post by **GeneralAdmission** » 20 Sep 2008, 18:57

Thanks for compliments, guys. :) Let me know how it goes.

scavvenjahh,

Yes it is rather complicated, no contest on that point. Fraps is certainly the equivalent of the "Easy Button".

If you do lots of recording with Fraps, it might still be worth your while to still pick up the MJPEG codec. It provides a high-quality intermediate format that saves a lot of disk space compared to Fraps videos.

Dem Pyros · Post by **Dem Pyros** » 20 Sep 2008, 20:53

Personally I just did it, and it's rather uncomplicated (your steps just make it seem harder than it is).

And once its set up, you only have to say "set capture file" every time and then it's easy.

Worked brilliantly my man. Just recorded a 30 minute demo playthrough.

30 minutes at 1440x900: Approximately six gigabytes.

Tiny bit of flickering at the beginning, but besides that it was smooth as 30fps in a video game can be :wink:

Post by **GeneralAdmission** » 20 Sep 2008, 21:41

Thanks for the feedback, Dem, and I'm glad to hear it worked so well for you.

Yes, the guide does come across more complicated than it actually is, but I wrote it with the goal of a complete newbie being able to follow it successfully. The first-time setup is the hardest part, for sure. I can have the apps running and configured in less than a minute when I want to record a game.

6GB for 30 minutes is great. Lemme guess...full round of TF2? ;)

Couple questions:

Did you monitor in-game framerate with Fraps or the game console while capturing? What was the avg. fps?

How much flickering at the beginning? Just a second or two?

Dem Pyros · Post by **Dem Pyros** » 20 Sep 2008, 21:56

It was actually a full playthrough of the Bioshock demo ;)

I didn't monitor FPS, but Bioshock, with everything on high, was, for the most part, smooth.

The flickering occurred for the first minute or two, but only in the video. When I was actually recording it I didn't notice a thing.

Post by **GeneralAdmission** » 20 Sep 2008, 22:10

The flickering occurred for the first minute or two, but only in the video. When I was actually recording it I didn't notice a thing.

Did you run the game fullscreen or windowed?

Dem Pyros · Post by **Dem Pyros** » 21 Sep 2008, 00:33

[quote]The flickering occurred for the first minute or two, but only in the video. When I was actually recording it I didn't notice a thing.

Did you run the game fullscreen or windowed?Fullscreen.

Post by **GeneralAdmission** » 21 Sep 2008, 00:51

[quote][quote]The flickering occurred for the first minute or two, but only in the video. When I was actually recording it I didn't notice a thing.

Did you run the game fullscreen or windowed?Fullscreen.
That's good news, but has got my curiosity up.

Would you be willing to fire it up in windowed mode and just record a minute or so to see if it flickers at all?

command line:
Bioshock.exe -window

Dem Pyros · Post by **Dem Pyros** » 21 Sep 2008, 02:22

Certainly.

I recorded for five minutes. No flickering during any parts of it.

Although The very bottom of the window was cut off, but I'm guessing that's due to the fact that I changed the resolution in-game.

Post by **GeneralAdmission** » 21 Sep 2008, 02:51

Thanks for the testing, Dem.

On random occasions I have been able to record fullscreen without any flickering caused by the overlay, but I've been unable to find an explanation as to why it worked.

I'm hoping that the guide will get enough exposure to get the attention of a coder/developer who might know how to solve the problem, which is the only major limitation, IMO.

P-Storm · Post by **P-Storm** » 21 Sep 2008, 23:46

The only thing I miss is, when you encode it to PICVideo, do you some other magic tricks, or are you using that file you get?

Post by **GeneralAdmission** » 22 Sep 2008, 01:39

The only thing I miss is, when you encode it to PICVideo, do you some other magic tricks, or are you using that file you get?

Not sure I understand the question...

VirtualDub will record an .avi using MJPEG compression. You can then edit or convert the file just like a Fraps .avi file.

If I answered the wrong question just let me know and I'll try again. :)

P-Storm · Post by **P-Storm** » 22 Sep 2008, 10:33

If I understand it correctly, you did record with Virtual dub, to a file with MJPEG compression. But did you resize them, with an another compression, because the files that you host are Xvid and such.

Also when I encode my fraps video's with MJPEG they are really big, with something like 300 MB for 5 sec. (and a small thing, windows explorer crashes if I want to see the video then, and vlc displaying that video blue overlay like, but windows media player displays it correctly :? )

Post by **GeneralAdmission** » 22 Sep 2008, 17:12

If I understand it correctly, you did record with Virtual dub, to a file with MJPEG compression. But did you resize them, with an another compression, because the files that you host are Xvid and such.

Also when I encode my fraps video's with MJPEG they are really big, with something like 300 MB for 5 sec. (and a small thing, windows explorer crashes if I want to see the video then, and vlc displaying that video blue overlay like, but windows media player displays it correctly :? )

All the sample footage is raw video capture to MJPEG, except for one BF2 video that I captured directly to Xvid+MP3/avi.

Did you adjust the compression slider in the MJPEG codec before re-encoding a Fraps video? You can customize quality vs. filesize as you like.

Not sure why explorer crashes, and VLC plays my video files just fine. It's possible you have some codecs clashing, or something even more nefarious going on in Windows' multimedia components (that could be causing crashes).

Have you tried loading a captured video back into VirtualDub for playback?

Dem Pyros · Post by **Dem Pyros** » 22 Sep 2008, 23:08

If I understand it correctly, you did record with Virtual dub, to a file with MJPEG compression. But did you resize them, with an another compression, because the files that you host are Xvid and such.

Also when I encode my fraps video's with MJPEG they are really big, with something like 300 MB for 5 sec. (and a small thing, windows explorer crashes if I want to see the video then, and vlc displaying that video blue overlay like, but windows media player displays it correctly :? )

1.) The video sizes are large for initial sizes, but once you get past a certain threshold they become much smaller per second.

EX: Test clip of Bioshock: 50 seconds, 888MB
Full play of Bioshock: 30 Minutes, 5.9GB

2.) To solve the explorer crashing problem:

Control Panel
System
Advanced Tab
Performance Settings
Data Execution Prevention
"Turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select: "
And then check the box for Windows Explorer.

Post by **GeneralAdmission** » 23 Sep 2008, 00:12

1.) The video sizes are large for initial sizes, but once you get past a certain threshold they become much smaller per second.

EX: Test clip of Bioshock: 50 seconds, 888MB
Full play of Bioshock: 30 Minutes, 5.9GB

That's a little surprising. My video captures have always had fairly consistent size differences based on duration.

What setting have you guys used on the MJPEG compression slider? Did you leave colorspace at 4/2/2?

Post by **g00seberry** » 23 Sep 2008, 18:05

Well I can't get it to work properly.
Anything i record ends up really jerky, no matter what codec i use, no matter what fps I enter, no matter anything.
The in-game FPS is fine however, but yet the video that is captured ends up jerky.

Here's an example of what i mean ... wdada.avi . Keyboard mash filename ... a run through of the CSS stress test.
It was recorded in "uncompressed", but I've converted it with divx to make it small enough to upload afterwards. The FPS is apparently 60.

Look at the fraps counter at the top, completely smooth fps, yet the video is all jerky. I've tried different fps values but it makes no difference. 10 or 10 gazillion, its still jerky. The fps values are the same in VDub and the recorder settings too so I aint done that wrong.

I've spent ages changing each individual setting and codec etc and trying again but the result is always the same no matter what i use. Fullscreen, windowed, no difference. I haven't set up the hotkey thing so i just tab in and out as you can see. Would that make a difference? Don't see why it would. I'm late now so can't carry on messing around with it. 8)

Specs in sig.

Widescreen Gaming Forum