Recording videos of TAO games.

[plusminus]

Hello people, thought I'd let you in on something I've been doing a bit lately: using free software to make a movie of what's going on on your desktop, allowing you to record TAO games (among other things) and play them back later. I find it's useful to rewatch games where I make one or two mistakes and analyze them more. It's also a good tool for battle reports, I imagine.

There's lots of software that can do this, but one I've found to work really well on any platform (or at least any likely to be used here), completely free, is VLC. http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Keep in mind you do need a fairly powerful computer to run it and play TAO at the same time.. mine is an Athlon 2400 (about 2 GHz) with 512 megs of ram, and TAO runs fairly choppy. It's still quite playable though, you get used to it quickly.

Easy setup: Once VLC is downloaded and installed, run it. Go to file > wizard. (Wizard might not exist for Mac users??)
-Choose Transcode/Save to file, click next.
-Choose Select a stream, enter "screen://" (without quotes) in the textbox, click next.
-Check both Transcode Video and Transcode Audio. For the video codec, MPEG-1 Video will do, with a low bitrate (96 kb/s is watchable). there are better quality codecs you could use, but MPEG-1 takes least processing power. For Audio, you can use MPEG audio, uncompressed, or dummy. I don't really see the need to record sound for TAO games so I use dummy with 16 kb/s. Click next.
-Choose MPEG 1 as your Encapsulation format, click next.
-Enter a filename and path in the textbox. Now when you click finish, you'll begin recording a movie. Click stop on the VLC control to stop recording.

Playback works best with VLC, for some reason it doesn't always write the fps in the proper way I think.

For more advanced settings tweaking, go to file > open file. You'll have to play around with this yourself, I've gone straight to..

The commandline, useful for Linux users or even automating in a Windows batch file. My settings look like this (all one line):

vlc screen:// -I rc --no-audio --no-sout-audio --sout
'#transcode{vcodec=mp1v,vb=96,acodec=dummy,ab=0,fp s=25,
deinterlace,cropleft=177,cropright=177,cropbottom= 94,croptop=170}
:standard{access=file,mux=mpeg1,dst=cap.mpg}'

This does the same thing and a bit more: for instance the cropxxx will crop the screen so you record only the TAO window. You'll have to play with these values to get them to fit your screen.

Enjoy, and make sure to post any good matches :)

[R.I.P]

ok ill try maybe...

[Merdoc.]

I'm going to give it a try.

[Soda]

Too much work.

[Buster]

I do that sometimes, But I also use just a s/s by s/s game.

I Like s/s by s/s more because.

1) No Lag.
2) Its so easy all I do is hit print screen.
3) You can spend more time looking at one move, with out pausing.
4) If you want it to move you dont have to do much.
5) Can be sent to people easier.

[Hughes]

Interesting.


I have done VID. of other games in progress too.

[shatterstar]

this'll be useful for tourneys and such.

I already have vlc. Perhaps I'll give it a try.

[Hoolwath]

I think this could be stickied and moved to suggestions, so that there are no such new threads.

[plusminus]

Sorry, is this old hat? I couldn't find anything about it after searching..

I do that sometimes, But I also use just a s/s by s/s game.

I Like s/s by s/s more because.

1) No Lag.
2) Its so easy all I do is hit print screen.
3) You can spend more time looking at one move, with out pausing.
4) If you want it to move you dont have to do much.
5) Can be sent to people easier.

The big advantage I see to doing things this way, and it is a big advantage, is no lag. Taking screenshots requires pasting the clipboard to a file repeatedly in a game, or using an external program (which I do, but regardless.) Anyhow, whatever works for you.

Actually thinking about it it would be probably easy to set up something to take regular screenshots, say every 3 seconds, and then merge them into an animated gif. (Easy on Linux at least; maybe Windows too but I wouldn't know how.)

[Jeffery]

If you run a windows PC, it is far easier to use Windows Media Encoder 9 series to do this kind of recording.
I've used it to record several games, and posted videos from it before. Also, Encoder can be used to broadcast the stream via the web.

[plusminus]

Do elaborate? I'm not a windows user, I'm sure some that are would appreciate a bit more info. Is this something that comes with windows by default? How does the CPU usage compare? etc.

[Jeffery]

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/default.mspx

You have to download and install. The processor load is not very high during recording, allows you to play TAO as normal on any midgrade PC and up.

There are way too many features to try and describe them all, but if you set the frames per second and the resolution high enough you get high quality output files.

[Kreator]

I just downloaded Windows Endoder 9 series. How do I get it running?

[Jeffery]

"There are way too many features to try and describe them all, but if you set the frames per second and the resolution high enough you get high quality output files."

And no, i will not give step by step instructions. Read the instructions and help files.

[Calon]

The program we all used in games which require fast action and no lag such as WoW (PvP), Tribes, AO, DAoC, and other MMOPRGs the program consistant throughout most movie makers is FRAPS (www.fraps.com).

Its not free but you can easily find sites out there that you can get it free from.

There is a free trial version last I checked that will allow you to record 30 seconds at a time.

This program was around when the computers we used to run it with are now considered trash... I dont remember much lag at all (if you had a nice machine back then) accept when you pressed your "start record" button.

I'll play around with this and see what it looks like... but as others have said - in a turned based environment the work required seems a bit much for a game of TAO.

The good thing about fraps is that there is tons of support and its geared towards game recording. It was designed knowing that you'd be playing a game and recording at the same time and that you didnt now want your recorder to adversly effect your game play.

[Batosi]

You guys are just now coming up with this? lol i've been doing this since 04. lol

[plusminus]

I'm sure lots of people have been doing this a long time. However, I'm also sure lots more people haven't because they didn't know how, or that it was even possible.

What software do you use to record?

[Enjoi]

I never new about this... I've only been gold less then a month and only played the game a few times before that. But this would be very cool to record your game so you can learn from your mistakes I might try it when I go back to my dad's house where my computer is fast.