a NEW capturing question (Is this possible...)

[theory]

Ok, I want to capture my PC screen playing a DVD I created. So I can have a recording to show how the menus work, etc. It would have to record the mouse-cursor too.

Is this possible?

[Tommyknocker]

CamStudio. 'Nuff said!

[theory]

CamStudio. 'Nuff said!

Oh man, I hope you are right!

[theory]

Damn it didn't work, the video comes up black:

http://www.thecomatorium.net/new.zip

[Tommyknocker]

My computer cannot find your file.

[theory]

My computer cannot find your file.

sorry try this one

http://www.tmvarchives.com/new.zip

[Tommyknocker]

I see. I also tried Windows Media Encoder with no success either. I will look at it again in the morning, as I'm on vacation.

[solarfox]

Theory -- The reason the video comes up black is that CamStudio (and programs like it) can only "see" and record what's in the video RAM which the PC has access to -- i.e. the "desktop space" VRAM, where the O/S and applications draw their dialog boxes, pointers, "skins", and so on.

Unfortunately, almost all modern video cards do MPEG decoding elsewhere, in an entirely separate hardware and memory space, then overlay the decoded video on top of the desktop space as the bytes of graphics data are fed to the DACs on their way out to the monitor. All the O/S does is tell the graphics card "I want you to put the video here, at these coordinates, scaled to this size", then draw an application window with a black space inside it to "reserve" that space in its own application-window management and start feeding MPEG data directly to the card's on-board MPEG decoder. The video card's overlay hardware then uses the "black space" as a key to know whether it should be displaying the MPEG decoder's data or the desktop-space data at any given pixel within the area the O/S told it to display the MPEG data at. (This is done so that if you then drag an application window partially over the playback video for any reason, the playback video doesn't cut into the app. window. Note that some cards don't even do that, and just blindly put the MPEG video on top regardless.)

So, all that CamStudio can "see" is the desktop space with its black rectangle; the MPEG-decoder is inaccessable to it, because that data is never actually drawn within the video memory which the CPU has access to.

You may -- note, "may" -- be able to overcome this by going into your Control Panel and disabling all hardware acceleration for your graphics card, in an attempt to force the O/S to use a software-only MPEG decoder which will have the CPU actually decoding the MPEG video and drawing it in the desktop-space memory frame by frame, where CamStudio can get to it. If you don't have gobs of CPU cycles to burn and a _really_ fast path to your video card (at least AGP 4X, I'd think), though, decompressing that MPEG video data in the CPU, shoveling it off to the video card pixel by pixel, then shoveling it all back into the CPU to be recompressed by whatever codec CamStudio is using is gonna bring your system to its knees pretty quick.

[theory]

Thanks for the lengthy response. I have tried the hardware accleration technique with no success, and yes it did bring my PC to its knees.

Is there any DVD programs that would allow recording, and I could click through my menus? I really just want a recording of how my menus work.

[gll99]

If your video card has a tv-out and you also have a separate capture card then loop the output from the video card to your capture card's rca jack in.

Once the cable is set up

1) start your capture app making sure you select the right input source.
2) start the dvd in full screen mode
3) let it run as needed then stop the DVD app
4) stop the capture app
5) all done except for editing the excess captured junk

You will get a full capture at max fps. If you have audio you will get that too.

Not fantastic but works!!!

[theory]

If your video card has a tv-out and you also have a separate capture card then loop the output from the video card to your capture card's rca jack in.

Once the cable is set up

1) start your capture app making sure you select the right input source.
2) start the dvd in full screen mode
3) let it run as needed then stop the DVD app
4) stop the capture app
5) all done except for editing the excess captured junk

You will get a full capture at max fps. If you have audio you will get that too.

Not fantastic but works!!!

lol, I wish I had all those goodies. I can't do that with my current setup, but at least I now know it's possible. Thanks!