Replay Of The Week

Weehawk · Post by **Weehawk** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 4:13 pm

The TJT wrote:Yes, very frameskippy. If you double the size, would you get double amount of frames included....If that's where choppiness comes from?

No. Storing a higher quality output slows down MAME even more and induces more frameskip.

Strangely enough however, I was toying with Vansibel's Samurai Showdown IV recording, as it is such an exemplary performance and in a MAME version that most members probably don't have, and while at low quality capturing, MAME runs pretty well, when you watch the output it is terrible. Capturing with a higher quality results in a better playback of the captured video, even though MAME must be running slower.

So now I have a 68 meg .wmv of it which might be good enough to be of value to someone, but I don't really have any place to put a file that big. Perhaps MARP could have a page for these type videos if there is enough interest. It might even attract visitors that would otherwise not be interested, and lure them into giving MAME a try.

It could also serve to showcase any World Record performances for the non-MAME world to watch in wonder. Take that, TG!

Vansibel · Post by **Vansibel** » Thu Apr 22, 2004 2:47 am

To Weehawk: The fact that the video look so choppy is because when capturing directly into window media, you were not only capturing but also compressing the data at the same time. With mame running at the same time, no need to say it must had required temendrous amount of ressource, so your capturing software had no choice but to drop a large amount of frame to be able to catch up. The best way to limit frame loss is to capture into uncompressed .avi, then encode it to wmv9 (altought I still reccoment XviD). I'll try to make some kind of sample during the next few day to give people an idea of a good conversion.

-Vansibel

Chad · Post by **Chad** » Thu Apr 22, 2004 4:29 am

depends on what you have for a bottleneck, cpu or harddrive bandwidth. but it's proly likely you can write the avi frames faster than compressing and doing mame, but with 2cpus it might not matter much compressing and doing mame. Even then you'd still get a larger movie file with the less frameskippy better quality. Wonder how much larger a full frame one would be?

even though John's was frameskippy it was certainly very clear and crisp, no bleeding between the frames which was nice.

Vansibel · Post by **Vansibel** » Thu Apr 22, 2004 3:57 pm

Ok, I made some test this morning and compared the performance of several codecs via this kind of recording. First, I converted that joust replay: captured at 15fps with sound and compressed it using XviD. File ended up about 6.7 meg, but the sound itself is about 1/3 of the file size. First, get the latest binary of the XviD codec here: http://koepi.roeder.goe.net/xvid.shtml (XviD will still play if you just have DivX installed, but image wont be as clear).
You can get the Joust replay by lord gaz at this address: ftp://67.70.112.169/Joust.zip

I also wanted to convert a replay of Esp Ra.de but couldn't get the input file working, so I ended up doing Zenon replay of "Guwange". Captured at 15 fps with sound, reduced both vertical and horizontal resolution by 25% and compressed it usind DivX pro 5.05. File ended up about 36meg for an half hour of gameplay.
Get DivX codec here: http://www.divx.com/
As for the replay: ftp://67.70.112.169/Guwange.zip
(Try pasting the link manually in explorer if you have trouble getting those, or best, use a ftp client)

What this show is that games from the golden era like Joust compress very well, because the imagery is not complex at all. On the other hand, newest game like gunwange can't handle such a low bitrate to be enjoyable to watch, since it contain lot's of mouvement and quick changing patern. I've noticed that DivX give better result for this kind of game at very low bitrate, while it's best to use XviD to preserve old games crispness, even at ridiculously low bitrate. I hope this will help peoples to understand the process and hopefully, we'll begin to see some more replay available this way.

Those conversion were done on a pIII 800, 384 ram, but a pII 500 with 128 ram would have been fairly enought. This, of course, apply only if you followed the method I was talking about earlier. (Both file were captured with Mjpeg codec, and then compressed using respectively XviD (joust) and DivX pro 5.05 (guwange). Link to both files are temporary and will be removed in the next few days.

-Vansibel

LN2 · Post by **LN2** » Fri Apr 23, 2004 1:19 am

I have suggested in the past here(?) but definitely elsewhere that one cool feature to add to MAME would be a movie capture feature.

I would implement it though only on playback of a recorded input file.

You play the game as you normally would...then on playing back an input instead of the video and audio of the game going to "you", it gets streamed to a movie output file instead. All the gamer sees is perhaps some progress bar.

There could be a couple options whether to save it as raw video or using a codec like mpg1 or 2 that requires no license/royalty fees to use so it can be included.

The audio could be made into mp3 or AIFF...depending on whether you wanted that step fast and then do separate encoding.

I figure most would use it to make short clips.

Part of the implementation could be where there is another key to toggle while watching an input file normally where to start and stop the capture....which gets saved to some batch file which you then can run to have it just capture that part of the playback instead of the whole thing.

The advantages to this type of implementation is that for most games, you can play it back at 5% speed if necessary cuz the CPU power required for the capture and encoding..so you can get a nice smooth 30fps or 15fps at whatever size you want and it just playback at a forced frameskip value...whatever was used for the recording.

For the few games that won't work even with this mode, then it would be difficult to do any capture without an external device(s) without screwing up the game timing.

danytoon · Post by **danytoon** » Tue Jun 01, 2004 3:53 pm

Chad wrote: I'll bet mamedev might be able to help with this to make a mame that commincates directly to a avi/mpeg maker to make mame send it frame by frame images in a streaming manner. so you don't have to find something that captures fast as mame can play it (and perhaps wastes big time quality to do so).

Hi!
First of all, sorry for bringing "back to life" an old and dead thread, but Im hardly looking for a good SCREEN CAPTURER that enables me to record and INP.. I tried with camtasia, but the AVIs I take with XVID codec and uncompressed looks very frame skipping and chopping...

Does really an utility that directly transf the INP to AVI? Ive been on mamedev, but I only saw an SAM to WAV converter...

sikraiken · Post by **sikraiken** » Tue Jun 01, 2004 3:57 pm

danytoon wrote:
Chad wrote: I'll bet mamedev might be able to help with this to make a mame that commincates directly to a avi/mpeg maker to make mame send it frame by frame images in a streaming manner. so you don't have to find something that captures fast as mame can play it (and perhaps wastes big time quality to do so).
Hi!
First of all, sorry for bringing "back to life" an old and dead thread, but Im hardly looking for a good SCREEN CAPTURER that enables me to record and INP.. I tried with camtasia, but the AVIs I take with XVID codec and uncompressed looks very frame skipping and chopping...

Does really an utility that directly transf the INP to AVI? Ive been on mamedev, but I only saw an SAM to WAV converter...

Older versions of MAME32 (I'm not sure when exactly they stopped...) had the option of either recording a replay to INP -OR- AVI, but you couldn't convert one to the other, or record both at the same time.

danytoon · Post by **danytoon** » Tue Jun 01, 2004 4:06 pm

Yep I know, but I need one that allows me to trans downloaded INPs to AVI.

sikraiken · Post by **sikraiken** » Tue Jun 01, 2004 6:07 pm

danytoon wrote:Yep I know, but I need one that allows me to trans downloaded INPs to AVI.

There's no program out there that does that (yet...?) directly.

danytoon · Post by **danytoon** » Tue Jun 01, 2004 7:23 pm

If it isnt, there must be heheheehe

A good "INP player" independent of the mame main program, with the option to save the plays to AVI, MPEG or WMV...

Any recommendation of where I must go to do this petition to someone?

Post by **mahlemiut** » Tue Jun 01, 2004 7:43 pm

danytoon wrote:A good "INP player" independent of the mame main program, with the option to save the plays to AVI, MPEG or WMV...

Not possible.

INP files are nothing more that input logs.

Chad · Post by **Chad** » Tue Jun 01, 2004 10:41 pm

mahlemiut wrote:
danytoon wrote:A good "INP player" independent of the mame main program, with the option to save the plays to AVI, MPEG or WMV...
Not possible.

INP files are nothing more that input logs.

to add: that ONLY mame can playback, so you do need mame, but code can be added to mame (like mame32 did) to automatically caputre an avi while mame was playing, but they duched that a while back, but i'm sure someone smart enough with media code could pick up the old code. But since they scraped it it probably means there was a mame change that made this just not easily possible anymore.