pouët.net

Does anyone have (or can do) a *good* video capture of Second Reality? The best one I can find is this one:

http://www.archive.org/details/FutureCrewSecondReality

But the chess board doesn't bounce in sync with the music. Some timer issues in later parts I think too.

The one in Mindcandy is correct, but the video quality is not too good for today's standards...

Lossless would be great.

here is a rip I did while back, its the best I could get it.

http://www.archive.org/details/FutureCrewSecondReality

doh.. i just realized the link you posted was to my video.. hehe ah well, I could not get it any better than that, I tried several times, dosbox gets pretty wonky when recording that demo

Which makes me think, has anyone tried kkapturing DOSBox? Is there any reaosn why it wouldn't work?

i ended up using fraps, kkapture can not run dos apps that I am aware of, unless someone has a modded version but I have not seen that, the major issue is with this demo is the resolution keeps changing, and it cause major issues with capturing this as video, in the end i was forced to use fraps and do it in sections, i spent a good day trying to capture this demo properly cause like Mr.doob i could not find a good quality video, I would also be interested if someone could do better than what I did in finding out how they did it, so if you by chance do, please explain how the hell you did it!

http://www.mindcandydvd.com/1/demos perhaps? :) No idea tho if the captures are available online nowadays.

Huh? A DOS-demo in DVD-resolution isn't good enough? :)

Resolution isn't everything, you know. ;)

I know -- so please tell me what's wrong with the way the DemoDVD-team spent months capturing the most famous PC demo in history.

They blacked out the Dolby logo.

According to Trace, the lack of the Dolby-logo wasn't his major complaint. :)

Cooking up a video atm.
You can also just use dosbox's built-in ctrl+F5 :)
My settings are: Gus enabled, ET4000 (s3 seems to glitch during the intro screenmode change), simple core, 386 emulation, 50000 cycles.

Don't worry about the jerkiness while recording, think kkapture-like capping.

Going to do both 4:3 stretched and "vanilla" and downconvert FPS to 60 since the 70fps looks rather awful without frame interpolation on 60hz.

I don't want to disappoint you, but the capture will most probably not be "correct". If that's what you want to go for - fine.
Converting to 60fps is fine with me (do it too), but in reality you should use a elaborate framerate conversion, not just "drop every n'th frame".
Pretty please: before encoding resize the video to double the real capture size, it gives a much better picture because of the way (lossy xvid, mp4) video codecs and also scaling in players work.

Yeah, I know.
Upscaled the framerate (strainght dupes) to 420fps and did a blend to 60fps in order to minimize the droprate.
As for 2x blowup, I'll do it, but first I will provide an lagarith encode which is around 1.5gigs~, this means no loss at all.

As for the aspect ratio: I actually blew stuff to 640x400 instead, media players can take care of the scaling since it isn't that hard.
If people REALLY want and need it, I will do the pre-scaled as well :p

And yes, not so sure on how accurate the capture is to the real deal as I don't have an GUS on my old dos system, otherwise I could have tried to capture it from there.

do a 6x blowup so it becomes 1920x1440 :D

1920x1200 i mean

Sure, I can do that but will you really need it? The advantages above 1280x800 are diminishing though as the source in low-res parts is 320x200 and 640x400 in hi-rez, basically getting less useful as the chrome subsampling issue is already avoided in hi-res parts with 1280x800 (lowres parts are 4x scaled already at this point)

http://lerppu.net/second_lagarith.avi for the 1.5~ gig cap in 640x400 (no loss, converted ~70fps > 60fps) Useful if you want to post-process yourself or just get the "flac-like" video.
Dithered plasma has some small framerate conversion artifacts, not that bad though. I can also give the original dosbox sources with their original resolution/refresh rate if anyone wants.

I'll have the x264 with 1280x800 up once the encoder is done and I get it uploaded.

That is the problem. If you uscale a 320x200 video to a 1920 screen, it'll look smudged. If you upscale it BEFORE it looks blockier, and thus more like the original.
Also codecs convert to YUV and downsample color/chroma, e.g. 4:2:2 or 4:2:0, thus color information is lost (color only for every other line vertically and/or horizontally). If you upsample (or encode to 4:4:4) you can at least make sure less information is lost.

Your framerate conversion sounds really good though!

No, they can't and yes it is.

Important point: Media player scale up AFTER compression.

Depends on the media players you are using, I personally just manually set filtering to either nearest (pixel art, older stuff) or bi-linear (movies etc..) in media player classic (VLC had one as well from what I remember). That way it always uses pixel perfect crisp scaling (no blending!), no matter what the content. I suggest looking it out since it can make so many videos look a lot better! :)
Oh, and MPC has it under: "Option" => "Playback" => "Output" ==> "Resizer: Nearest neighbour"
We actually used that in demowall2010 when we had mixed low-res content and hi-res stuff already at the projector's native resolution, you can't really tell the difference. (Nowdays we do pre-upscale everything to the projector res so there are as little issues as possible.)

Done with the x264, will get it uploaded once I am done with the 4:3 (1600x1200, sorry, no 1920 for you gargaj! the aspect ratio is like it's supposed to be though, so you will just have black bars with 1920x1200 and 1:1 pixel mapping)

Hopefully these three videos will be enough to satisfy people :p

Oh yeah, that media player scaling of course assumes that you have no lossy content (like raw avi). with 2x blasted content like 640x480 stretched to a big screen, there still is a big difference even with the subsampling issues defeated.

here is a dosbox capture in mp4.
was taken at 640x400 and encoded 2x2.
sound comes from the original s3m, not from the emulator.

Ah, great!
Looks good.
I'll just cancel the encodes then and I'd suggest for people to use that one instead.