what is the best tool to capture video of a pc demo

category: general [glöplog]

Hey everyone, sorry if this is a dupe thread,

I recently released my first pc demo and tried to provide a video capture of it on youtube as well. But running the capture tool and the demo on the same machine didn't perform too well, even though my demo is pretty light on the CPU. I tried Cam Studio and Camtasia tools and could barely get a <15 fps 400x300 capture.

What do you guys use for this? is there a better way/tool

Thanks

added on the 2010-01-15 02:15:52 by nightlord

Kkapture

repacking with VirtualDub makes sense tho, to reduce the filesize even more !

added on the 2010-01-15 02:35:55 by ɧ4ɾɗվ.

Short version:

Best way: code a video/image sequence writer into the demo, encode using your favourite video software
Second best way: use .kkapture (see hardy's link), capture in a lossless format (huffyuv or lagarith), then use virtualdub et al. to postprocess (cut, crop, resize, etc) and encode.

Don't encode directly out of kkapture tho. For good quality you will want to employ 2-pass encoding and trying to do that out of kkapture is a royal pain in the ass.

added on the 2010-01-15 03:04:26 by kb_

You could try Fraps?

added on the 2010-01-15 03:20:26 by biasz

Fraps does realtime capture exactly as Camtasia, Cam Studio, Hipercam, etc etc., so it's not what he needs.

--> Follow kb's advice. REALLY.

added on the 2010-01-15 06:13:53 by iq

if you go for his first advice, the the easiest is probably to save every frame of the demo in .tga format. Virtualdubmod can read sequence of .tga's and produce a clip for you.

Code:


    // save XRES*YRES rgb (24Bpp) buffer to disk as a tga
    bool saveBuffer( const unsigned int *buffer, int xres, int yres, const char *fileName )
    {
        unsigned char head24[18] = { 0x00, 0x00, 0x02, 0x00,
           0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 
           XRES&255, XRES>>8, YRES&255, YRES>>8, 0x18, 0x00};
        FILE *fp = fopen( fileName, "wb" );
        if( !fp ) return false;
        fwrite( head24, 18, 1, fp );
        fwrite( buffer, 3*XRES*YRES, 1, fp );
        fclose(fp);
        return true;
    }

added on the 2010-01-15 06:22:07 by iq

hey thanks a lot for the info guys. outputting video (tga or other) looks like the highest quality. I will have a better capture next time :)

added on the 2010-01-15 07:15:49 by nightlord

Use kkapture, man. and take a look at this (and the page in general) too.

added on the 2010-01-15 10:17:22 by raer

Quote:

a royal pain in the ass

iam quite impressed !

added on the 2010-01-15 11:23:29 by _H2o_

I'd vote for kkapture too. when something is well done, use it. :)

added on the 2010-01-15 12:52:58 by nystep

Unless, of course, it is your demo, in which case dumping the frames makes much more sense.

added on the 2010-01-15 12:57:14 by gloom

gloom: ...just like kb already suggested would be the best option ;)

added on the 2010-01-15 13:15:55 by kusma

kusma, i'd just code the frame dumping myself and then compress it with virtualdub.

added on the 2010-01-15 21:00:54 by skrebbel

The best tool to capture a pc demo? A PC!

added on the 2010-01-15 21:12:27 by Joghurt

kusma: That was sort of my point. :) After both kb and IQ already suggested the best solution, going "use kkapture!" seems like a weird thing to say.

added on the 2010-01-15 21:17:45 by gloom

thanks, i laughed :D

added on the 2010-01-15 22:29:29 by nystep

dumping n per second hires TGAs... well, i hope you have enough free diskspace :D

added on the 2010-01-15 22:37:16 by post malone

Just use libpng and dump pngs... I did that yesterday for timeless, 30FPS at 1280x720, 3:20 mins of video, made about 2,60GB of PNGs. That's bareable.

added on the 2010-01-15 22:39:51 by xTr1m