Capturing ingame, OpenGL (As avi)

[sykoi]

I'm having a bit of trouble; I'm trying to create videos for a game I'm making (To show off our amazing engine), and have many people with nice systems helping out in this area... But none of them can record (With fraps) at over 24FPS.

This is a problem, as each of their systems are over 3ghz, all have the newest video cards, 1+gb of ram, etc.... One even has SATA RAID 0!

I've come to the conclusion that hard drives, even if they're RAID 0, just can't record MPEG-1/2 very quickly and keep up a decent frame rate.


So I'm here to ask: What else can we use? There aren't many good video capturers out there, and few of them actually capture game video - nearly all of them cost money so I can't test each and every one of them.

Basically all I need is something that captures as AVI, so it uses more CPU rather than hard drive (Faster CPUs are cheap, faster hard drives (SCSI, RAID 0, etc.) aren't).



Thanks in advanced if anyone can help me, I've already released one video (I'm not going to advertise it here, but check my profile for a link), and want to release more - at a higher framerate, and longer length this time.

[daveoggy]

Just downloaded vid...

I am supprised to read that you believe hard disk performance is the bottleneck in your setup, this is very unlikely. The CPU is the limiting factor as it's having to run both the game and the encoding process at the same time. Quite frankly I'm astonished you get the speed and quality that you do.

There are some things you could do to improve the process if you haven't already:

1. Run the game in the same resolution as your final movie i.e 640 x 480 and Consider lower resolutions like 512 x 384 or 400 x 300. This will give the CPU a fighting chance.

2. If you have a duel processor system lying around download the utility here http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20040528/index.html and assign the game to run on one CPU and FRAPS to run on the other.

3. If you have access to a standalone DVD recorder, connect your GFX card using the S-Video Out (You do have a TV out right?), record the game, rip the resulting MPEG2 video from the DVD and manipulate to your hearts desire. This is obviously CPU independent and may give the best results.

Let me know I find this all very interesting.

[sykoi]

Just downloaded vid...

I am supprised to read that you believe hard disk performance is the bottleneck in your setup, this is very unlikely. The CPU is the limiting factor as it's having to run both the game and the encoding process at the same time. Quite frankly I'm astonished you get the speed and quality that you do.

There are some things you could do to improve the process if you haven't already:

1. Run the game in the same resolution as your final movie i.e 640 x 480 and Consider lower resolutions like 512 x 384 or 400 x 300. This will give the CPU a fighting chance.

2. If you have a duel processor system lying around download the utility here http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20040528/index.html and assign the game to run on one CPU and FRAPS to run on the other.

3. If you have access to a standalone DVD recorder, connect your GFX card using the S-Video Out (You do have a TV out right?), record the game, rip the resulting MPEG2 video from the DVD and manipulate to your hearts desire. This is obviously CPU independent and may give the best results.

Let me know I find this all very interesting.

Thanks, we were discussing lowering the game resolution to 640x480 and recording at half-size with FRAPS, but you wouldn't be able to see certain aspects as well.

As for the comment about hard drive speed being a factor: several of us were thinking, that since FRAPS is recording directly to the hard drive - at about 80mb/sec (?? I wouldn't doubt if it were this high, or possibly higher - FRAPS records as uncompressed video), the hard drive would be lagging the system a certain amount... I realize FRAPS uses a lot of processing power, but we did some tests:

We tested running the engine at 1024x768 on 3 different systems - a $5,000 system, a $2,000 system and a $800 system... All three recorded at roughly the same FPS - but the high quality system ran at 120 FPS without fraps, the medium quality one at 90 FPS, and the low end at 30 FPS.

The above test alone made us think that hard drive speed is a big factor, as we all had 7200 RPM drives.

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Unrelated question: Did you like the video? Spent awhile working on it, perfecting it, etc., so I'm looking for critique
(About to post it on supernova and lokitorrent, actually :P)

[daveoggy]

I've come to the conclusion that hard drives, even if they're RAID 0, just can't record MPEG-1/2 very quickly and keep up a decent frame rate.

Sorry that led me to believe FRAPS encoded the video to MPEG1 or 2. In the case of uncompressed video then yes, hard drive speed is definately a factor.

Lowering the resolution would decrease the size of each frame and hence the bitrate needed to record the video. So that may be your only way to go.

Test your hard disks to see what their average write speed is. You can then determine what the best compromise between size and speed is, as you can calculate the bitarate of umcompressed video if you know the resolution and vice versa.

[sykoi]

Thanks, I'll try that - but I'd still like to find an avi/xvid/divx video recorder... It'd be nice to rely more on CPU then hard drive speed, so we can record at 1024x768 (On very fast systems, obviously)

[daveoggy]

I think I have the solution for you here http://www.techsmith.com/products/studio/tutorials/1014.1.asp That guide is for a program called Camtasia which is relatively inexpensive and comes with a 30 day trial period.

This would probably work well along with the utility I posted the link to earlier if you have a Dual CPU or HT machine available.

Hows that?

[sykoi]

thanks I'll see if anyone has a dual cpu setup

[daveoggy]

Please, please keep this thread updated, I couldn't be more interested

Good luck.

[NewbyNewb]

Seems you have many computers, couldnt you use one computer to play and another computer just for capturing?

I dont know how this would work though or what hardware you would need...