MAME Movie Maker released

[Silver]

@Buddabing

Well you could change to the "job-running" mode of virtualdub using the script file you have now, although you would have to re-introduce all the line beginning with "\\" that you don't need for script execution.

I think a batch solution might be more workable, and allow people to opt-out of it should they wish to be alerted to errors.

Vid encoding:

I've found another (could this be the last?) encoding issue - what I had hoped that games wouldn't do, does - they change resolution on the fly.

The only game I have that does this is 'cbaj'. Its one of this ones that changes resolution during start up, but it seems to do it later on in the attract mode too. The attract for this game goes: show a white animated logo, a demo game, the white logo again,  demo game with onscreen instructions.

This white logo seems to be a different resolution to the rest, so when it hits a second time all the previous pngs are blanked (takes a while - I thought it had crashed), and you end up with a minute of black, then a nice vid of the demo game.

You would get a nice attract video in this game by simply quitting on the 2nd resolution change (you still have a demo game to watch).

[Buddabing]

Should we start looking at modifing the batch file to check the size of the video and get rid of super big ones that most likely didn't work, and super tiny ones that didn't work and have it auto retry them with different paramaters, or is that beyond the scope you wanted for this?

well, at the end you can do a dir /os *.avi and it'll sort them by size. Then you can rerun makemovies.bat with just the biggest and smallest. You may also want to tweak the movie length parameters. Right now I just want to get a clean, unattended run complete. I made the batch.bat change to not run the Vdub if the .vdb file doesn't exist, and so far it's okay, up to "alcon".

Actually, it might be best to first run makemovies.bat once with a very small movie size. That way, you should be able to get rid of the games that you have to run, then reset, in order to get to work (ie defender).

[Silver]

Should we start looking at modifing the batch file to check the size of the video and get rid of super big ones that most likely didn't work, and super tiny ones that didn't work and have it auto retry them with different paramaters, or is that beyond the scope you wanted for this?

Assuming by superbig you mean several hundred megs, then this will only happen if you have not installed the video codec you are trying to use. If this works for 1 game, it should work for all assuming you stick to the same codec. I believe all known issues causing people to switch codecs are currently resolved in Buddabings latest release.

As for super small - could you supply an example? The only thing I can think of here is that a game is stuck on a calibration screen because it has not been run before and the static screen is used as the loop?

[Silver]

so far it's okay, up to "alcon".

What happens with alcon? is that an error or just where you happen to be up to?

[Buddabing]

so far it's okay, up to "alcon".

What happens with alcon? is that an error or just where you happen to be up to?

That's just what I was up to. I had to go back and delete everything since I don't have divx on the machine I'm generating the videos on. So I'm going to encode with -movievideo 2. I'll switch to -movievideo 1 later on just to make sure that works consistently.

[Rocky]

My only problem is that I don't know how to alter the listgen program and it's trying to make videos for roms I don't have (using .71)

Open the listgen.ini file, and set audit roms to 1 not 0. This will create a batch that will only do videos of roms you have.


On a more general note, you will get a virtualdub error "file not found" if mame was unable to run the game.

[Silver]

I really should just compile my own version of .71  Will your patch work with older versions of MAME?

I think Buddabing was planning to release the source for his patch once its running smoothly on Mame 0.90 (the exe's he is currently releasing are based 0.89) so you may be able to take a look then.

At a guess I'd say the mame version would have to have the code for png and wav creation. I don't know when these features were added.

[Buddabing]

I really should just compile my own version of .71  Will your patch work with older versions of MAME?

I think Buddabing was planning to release the source for his patch once its running smoothly on Mame 0.90 (the exe's he is currently releasing are based 0.89) so you may be able to take a look then.

At a guess I'd say the mame version would have to have the code for png and wav creation. I don't know when these features were added.

-wavwrite was added in v0.84. Don't know about the png screen shots. It was in there as of v0.55.

Once I make the source available, it should be very easy to port it to any version. If the version is earlier than v0.84, I can add something to null out the sound input. Of course, the mame.ini would have to be changed.

The actual changing of the MAME code for this utility is in four main places:
mame.h - defining storage for the moviemaker options, such as -makemovie, -movievideo, etc.
windows\config.c - adding the definitions of the options
usrintrf.c - slight change to the screen shot code
common.c - creating the screen shots, detecting the loop, and so on. This could be moved to a separate file for portability.

I am having some problems with my porting everything to v0.90. I'll probably end up releasing the entire source I used for v0.89, not in patch form.

[2600]

Budda,
 Just curious but what kind of problems are you having with the porting.  I looked at your source the first go round and it didn't seem exotic.  And I didn't thing too much changed in .90 besides the tool chain for compiling.

Anyways just curious.

[Buddabing]

Budda,
 Just curious but what kind of problems are you having with the porting.  I looked at your source the first go round and it didn't seem exotic.  And I didn't thing too much changed in .90 besides the tool chain for compiling.

Anyways just curious.

I am trying to get a new version of the ImageMagick libraries to work. I may end of blowing that off.

[Silver]

Does mame use ImageMagick internally?

and whats the advantage of newer versions? Just curious.

By the way I'm having lots of success encoding now - havn't hit a hitch in ages.....(although no doubt I'll regret saying that.....)

[papaschtroumpf]

Wow, I go away for the holidays and now I have to play catch up.
It's a long thread, and while I intend to go through it all, I want to make sure that I get the jest of it:

Buddabing made an add-on patch to MAME that automatically detects the start and stop of the attract loop in MAME games and captures the video to automagically generate attract movies through some kind of automated batch process, is that right?
- do you have a choice of size and codec for the video? I have a large harddrive and I'd like to get fairly large and detailed videos to replace the postage stamps ones that were in the torrent that was made available a while back.
- does it capture sound at the same time? I'd like to have sound in my attract videos. volume would need to be normalized between the different videos.

[Silver]

Buddabing made an add-on patch to MAME that automatically detects the start and stop of the attract loop in MAME games and captures the video to automagically generate attract movies through some kind of automated batch process, is that right?

Basically, yes.

- do you have a choice of size and codec for the video? I have a large harddrive and I'd like to get fairly large and detailed videos to replace the postage stamps ones that were in the torrent that was made available a while back.

There is a limited choice of codec at present, set by the movievideo option. 0 is uncompressed RGB, 1 is cinepak, 2 is Xvid. The resolution is simply the exact resolution of the game. You do not have control of the codec settings (although you could modify the patch when Buddabing releases the source).

The Xvid settings are reasonably generous, and I find that I can play back movies fullscreen and they look good.

- does it capture sound at the same time? I'd like to have sound in my attract videos. volume would need to be normalized between the different videos.

It captures sound corectly synced to the video, and is in the avi either as uncompressed (movieaudio 0) or mp3 (movievideo 1).  At the moment there is no normalising - I have not noticed much of a levels issue between movies, but I've not been looking (hearing). Adding a normalise type option would be trivial if required.

I find using Xvid/mp3 creates higher quality attract videos than any on the web (I am not talking about the crashtest MNG attracts though, as I these are basically lossless)

[Buddabing]

Does mame use ImageMagick internally?

and whats the advantage of newer versions? Just curious.

By the way I'm having lots of success encoding now - havn't hit a hitch in ages.....(although no doubt I'll regret saying that.....)

My CPMaker code uses ImageMagick calls. There was a call in there that I used that was added in the last revision. I decided the extra effort getting the new revision to work wasn't worth it anyway.

[Buddabing]

Buddabing made an add-on patch to MAME that automatically detects the start and stop of the attract loop in MAME games and captures the video to automagically generate attract movies through some kind of automated batch process, is that right?

Basically, yes.

- do you have a choice of size and codec for the video? I have a large harddrive and I'd like to get fairly large and detailed videos to replace the postage stamps ones that were in the torrent that was made available a while back.

There is a limited choice of codec at present, set by the movievideo option. 0 is uncompressed RGB, 1 is cinepak, 2 is Xvid. The resolution is simply the exact resolution of the game. You do not have control of the codec settings (although you could modify the patch when Buddabing releases the source).

The Xvid settings are reasonably generous, and I find that I can play back movies fullscreen and they look good.

- does it capture sound at the same time? I'd like to have sound in my attract videos. volume would need to be normalized between the different videos.

It captures sound corectly synced to the video, and is in the avi either as uncompressed (movieaudio 0) or mp3 (movievideo 1).  At the moment there is no normalising - I have not noticed much of a levels issue between movies, but I've not been looking (hearing). Adding a normalise type option would be trivial if required.

I find using Xvid/mp3 creates higher quality attract videos than any on the web (I am not talking about the crashtest MNG attracts though, as I these are basically lossless)

FYI -movievideo 0 is uncompressed AVI, -movievideo 1 is DivX, -movievideo 2 is Cinepak, and -movievideo 3 is Xvid.

If there is interest we probably could probably create a script to make mngs instead of avis.

I'm running a batch file now to create all the avis with -movievideo 2. It's done 200+ so far. Disk space is averaging 12 meg each thus far. XVid was taking a bit less space IIRC.

[BuZz880]

I have made 578 videos which total 2.24GB using Xvid.  I obviously have not been through them all; I know they are all successful but presumably a couple are just bios screens or something like that.

About 200 were from my favorites list; the remainder were a) lightgun games, b) trackball games c) 4 player games and d) newly added games (v.80 or better), only the new adds and a few favorites were clones.

The largest is toobin at 103.5MB
The smallest is gunfight at 107kb

There are 187 under 1MB in size.  There are 59 over 10MB.  I have not seen any but the smallest ones that are not good .. ie stuck on a bios screen or lousy intros with nothing more than a high score screen.  The latest version of Movie maker hammered through my list of failures on previous versions almost flawlessly and I think created a better product... better loop detection.

I have no plans of making anymore. 

[Howard_Casto]

I noticed someone mentioned making the videos better quality...  while my personal collection is of a higher quality than the 3d arcade ones, I was aware of what my video card can handle. 

Keep in mind that video frames in any of the hardware accelerated front ends are treated as textures.  This means, unless your video card is good, the fe will choke if the vids are larger than 255 by 255. (actualy 256 by 256, but directx has this odd 1 pixel offset error so 255 is best) 

The compression isn't so important, but the size is.  Just keep that in mind. 

Also a question..... are the vids being captured in a square ratio?  It nearly doubles the efficiency upon playback if they are.  It's not a necessary step, but again, if your video card is older, doing so will greatly help speed.

Anyway... keep up the good work and be sure to let us know when it's ported to .90

[Silver]

Keep in mind that video frames in any of the hardware accelerated front ends are treated as textures.  This means, unless your video card is good, the fe will choke if the vids are larger than 255 by 255. (actualy 256 by 256, but directx has this odd 1 pixel offset error so 255 is best) 

Are you talking about particular FEs? I've tried mamewah and it plays odd sized videos - 512x384, toobin for example, fine. (obviously shrunk to fit)

Also a question..... are the vids being captured in a square ratio?  It nearly doubles the efficiency upon playback if they are.  It's not a necessary step, but again, if your video card is older, doing so will greatly help speed.

Currently everything is made at the resolution of the game in mame(ie the resolution of the generated pngs). There is a fix to insure the resolutions x and y are divisible by 2 as most codecs prefer this.
By square ratio do you mean of  1:1 for x and y (ie don't keep aspect of the game) or do you mean something like keeping each resolution a multiple of 16? (that I know a lot of MPEG based codecs are much more effecient at)

[sWampy]

I did all the neogeo games last night, and they all seemed to work perfectly, except for the first few frames of a lot of them were the wiered green graphics screen from the bootup.

[Buddabing]

I am satisfied with the stability of this utility. It's run for two days with no problems.

I have ported my build of MAME - it doesn't have a name per se -

[Buddabing]

@Buddabing

Well you could change to the "job-running" mode of virtualdub using the script file you have now, although you would have to re-introduce all the line beginning with "\\" that you don't need for script execution.

I think a batch solution might be more workable, and allow people to opt-out of it should they wish to be alerted to errors.

Vid encoding:

I've found another (could this be the last?) encoding issue - what I had hoped that games wouldn't do, does - they change resolution on the fly.

The only game I have that does this is 'cbaj'. Its one of this ones that changes resolution during start up, but it seems to do it later on in the attract mode too. The attract for this game goes: show a white animated logo, a demo game, the white logo again,

[Buddabing]

Hello,

I've also updated version 0.89 with the latest and greatest code. The zip file, including source and binary, is here. (EDIT: link removed)

Please post any bug reports, feature requests, etc. to this thread.

[Howard_Casto]

Keep in mind that video frames in any of the hardware accelerated front ends are treated as textures.

[Silver]

Well anything that uses hardware aceleration which means that mamewah, a gdi based fe is safe. Basically Dragon King, 3dArcade, Kymera and anything that'll use the movie as a texture will suffer. 

Ah, I did not realise that!

By square I mean a 1:1 ratio.  Peter and myself use the aspect ratio of the snapshot to fix the ratio back upon playback, I dunno how other fes do it.  Multiples of 16 aren't as important as they used to be.  Your video card would have to be really frikkin old to have to worry about that.  However, being under the maximum texture size your card can handle, (which is a multiple of 16) is important. 

Btw, if your pc is farily modern, you shouldn't have to worry about these things at all.  I am aware of how some poor souls in this community try to scrape by with a 300mhz pc though, so I thought I would mention all of this in case budda wants to add options for that type of rendering. 

Back when the original 3darcade videos were being made, peter and myself argued over this point a lot.  I prefer high quality and ghetto users can deal with it, while he takes the conservative route.  As the years, have passed, however, I seem to have softened towards those people who don't invest enough money in their pc. 

Well now that the sources are out, its perfectly possible to modify the source to change .vdb file created to compress/resize/filter in pretty much anyway you like. I have no idea if Buddabing would or would not like to add this functionality.

If anyone wants to do these kind of changes, the 2 ways I suggest:

1) create uncompressed videos (as one of buddabings options) and then run another session of virtualdub in the batch to recompress/resize etc.. as desired. I recommend doing it as part of the batch loop as otherwise you would need ridiculous amounts of storage to create them all first....

2) Better option: find where the .vdb file is created in buddabing's source patch and alter as desired. To find out what you want, run virtualdub   and set it up with filters etc.. for what you want (resize etc..) then save it as a job. Looking in the virtualdub.jobs file will show you the text you need to include in the vdb file.

If anyone is very keen on 2), and Buddabing wants to leave it, I can help with an appropriate virtualdub script. Or Buddabing if you want to add another option for lower quality (ie reaspect/resize everything to 256x256 so it works well as a texture) I can fire over the required script changes.

[Buddabing]

Well anything that uses hardware aceleration which means that mamewah, a gdi based fe is safe. Basically Dragon King, 3dArcade, Kymera and anything that'll use the movie as a texture will suffer. 

Ah, I did not realise that!

By square I mean a 1:1 ratio.  Peter and myself use the aspect ratio of the snapshot to fix the ratio back upon playback, I dunno how other fes do it.  Multiples of 16 aren't as important as they used to be.  Your video card would have to be really frikkin old to have to worry about that.  However, being under the maximum texture size your card can handle, (which is a multiple of 16) is important. 

Btw, if your pc is farily modern, you shouldn't have to worry about these things at all.  I am aware of how some poor souls in this community try to scrape by with a 300mhz pc though, so I thought I would mention all of this in case budda wants to add options for that type of rendering. 

Back when the original 3darcade videos were being made, peter and myself argued over this point a lot.  I prefer high quality and ghetto users can deal with it, while he takes the conservative route.  As the years, have passed, however, I seem to have softened towards those people who don't invest enough money in their pc. 

Well now that the sources are out, its perfectly possible to modify the source to change .vdb file created to compress/resize/filter in pretty much anyway you like. I have no idea if Buddabing would or would not like to add this functionality.

If anyone wants to do these kind of changes, the 2 ways I suggest:

1) create uncompressed videos (as one of buddabings options) and then run another session of virtualdub in the batch to recompress/resize etc.. as desired. I recommend doing it as part of the batch loop as otherwise you would need ridiculous amounts of storage to create them all first....

2) Better option: find where the .vdb file is created in buddabing's source patch and alter as desired. To find out what you want, run virtualdub   and set it up with filters etc.. for what you want (resize etc..) then save it as a job. Looking in the virtualdub.jobs file will show you the text you need to include in the vdb file.

If anyone is very keen on 2), and Buddabing wants to leave it, I can help with an appropriate virtualdub script. Or Buddabing if you want to add another option for lower quality (ie reaspect/resize everything to 256x256 so it works well as a texture) I can fire over the required script changes.

I can add an option which will make the vdb script trim the video to 256x256. I have no objection. I would like Silver to create a sample vdb that I can use. I presume we want to trim off the longer side and then reduce (or expand if less than 256?) the movie.

I would prefer that we not have a zillion different builds of this build of MAME floating around, because people will want the "help desk" to solve all their problems, and it will be considerably more difficult if everyone has their own non-standard build.

[Silver]

Ok I've emailed Buddabing an addition to the script to resize to 256x256.

I've just remembered that Howard suggested 255x255 instead, so Buddabing you can just change those two numbers.

Obviously this loses the aspect ratio, but Howard seeing as you said that you correct for this in the FE I'm assuming you don't want it cropped as well?

[Zero_Hour]

Just want to say thanks to Budda and Silver on this one. I've been running it for the last few days, and it works great!

[Howard_Casto]

Ok I've emailed Buddabing an addition to the script to resize to 256x256.

I've just remembered that Howard suggested 255x255 instead, so Buddabing you can just change those two numbers.

Obviously this loses the aspect ratio, but Howard seeing as you said that you correct for this in the FE I'm assuming you don't want it cropped as well?

no... cropping would be bad....

actually 256 by 256 is just as good, but dx has this wierd pixel offest error...  sometimes when blending a texture that is the video card's texture limit, you can get artifacts on the absolute edge. 

I think the 3darcade ones are 256 by 256 again, i dunno. 

[Buddabing]

I'm confused about this a bit. Won't the videos look funny if they are resized to exactly 256x256 or 255x255? Shouldn't we make the -longest- dimension 256 or 255?

mk 400x254 -> resize to 256x162
tron 480x512 -> resize to 240x256

And which is it, 255 or 256? Can someone tell that by experimentation?

Another thing, aren't 256x256 sized textures a features on mostly high-end video cards? I thought that a good chunk of mid-sized cards had a 128x128 texture limit.

[Popcorrin]

Well anything that uses hardware aceleration which means that mamewah, a gdi based fe is safe. Basically Dragon King, 3dArcade, Kymera and anything that'll use the movie as a texture will suffer.

[Silver]

I'm confused about this a bit. Won't the videos look funny if they are resized to exactly 256x256 or 255x255? Shouldn't we make the -longest- dimension 256 or 255?

mk 400x254 -> resize to 256x162
tron 480x512 -> resize to 240x256

And which is it, 255 or 256? Can someone tell that by experimentation?

Yes the video will look funny (squashed/stretched). However, it sounds like a the FE's that use them correct for this to make them look normal. The main reason for doing this seems to be that a 1:1 ratio is much easier/more effecient for a graphics card to playback as a texture. Your resizes above are not 1:1 so lose the advantage that Howard talked about. It sounds strange to me too, but I have no experience in programming textures in DirectX.

[Silver]

I'm curious, what are the benefits and disadvantages of  showing the movie as a texture as compared to how mamewah does it.  Is doing one way better than another?

Well Minwah can just playback the movie in a box.

As a texture, it can be manipulated in 3D and such things. So you can naviagte round a 3D room full of arcade cabs, and actually see the videos playing back on the screen as you move round and walk up it - its all moving in perspective to you as you move closer etc..etc...

At least, this is the main reason I presume its used for.

[Buddabing]

I'm confused about this a bit. Won't the videos look funny if they are resized to exactly 256x256 or 255x255? Shouldn't we make the -longest- dimension 256 or 255?

mk 400x254 -> resize to 256x162
tron 480x512 -> resize to 240x256

And which is it, 255 or 256? Can someone tell that by experimentation?

Yes the video will look funny (squashed/stretched). However, it sounds like a the FE's that use them correct for this to make them look normal. The main reason for doing this seems to be that a 1:1 ratio is much easier/more effecient for a graphics card to playback as a texture. Your resizes above are not 1:1 so lose the advantage that Howard talked about. It sounds strange to me too, but I have no experience in programming textures in DirectX.

The 3darcade documentation says:
I STRONGLY recommend to batchresize your marquee's and screenshots and all other artwork you plan to show inside the 3d environment to a power of 2 format. I would suggest 256x256 for screenshots and marquees. And if your graphic card can handle it 256x512 for pinball playfields. This will depending on your videocard give a nice perfomance boost while texturizing models on the fly. This is essential for good performance in cylarcade mode and with the cycling of bitmaps on the screenshot texture in fpsarcade mode.

So I guess that's good enough for me.

[Silver]

Ah nice one - 256 it is......

A curiosity question: I've noticed that recently in your patch, the on-screen-fps display has been disabled. Also, it seems that throttle has been hardcoded as on. This does not make much difference, but I was just curious if there was a particular reason for these?

[Minwah]

I have a new version of ListGen available, too. No major changes, I made it so that the batch file created to make movies doesn't have the copy and delete steps at the beginning and end.

Sorry for being dumb but where can I get this?

[Buddabing]

I've created a -moviesquare flag which will resize the movies to 256x256. Someone familiar with 3darcade or Dragon King should try this and make sure this is what they want.

I fixed a small bug where if a black screen went on forever then the movie would never end. This typically is a problem only with non-working games.

I've uploaded new binaries and source to both version 0.89 and version 0.90.

[Buddabing]

I have a new version of ListGen available, too. No major changes, I made it so that the batch file created to make movies doesn't have the copy and delete steps at the beginning and end.

Sorry for being dumb but where can I get this?

The latest ListGen is here. I made the MAME version detection match what is projected to be the future naming convention of MAME. They are planning to have MAME go to 0.100 instead of 1.0 after 0.99. This would have broken the previous version of ListGen. There probably should be smarter detection code for very early versions of MAME.

[Howard_Casto]

I'm confused about this a bit. Won't the videos look funny if they are resized to exactly 256x256 or 255x255? Shouldn't we make the -longest- dimension 256 or 255?

mk 400x254 -> resize to 256x162
tron 480x512 -> resize to 240x256

And which is it, 255 or 256? Can someone tell that by experimentation?

Another thing, aren't 256x256 sized textures a features on mostly high-end video cards? I thought that a good chunk of mid-sized cards had a 128x128 texture limit.

This is very true.... however, both dx and opengl automatically break the texture up into blocks and re-assemble them.  In all honesty 128 would be the most compatable size, however, chances are if you have a video card that old (256 has been the standard for about 3 years now)  you won't be running 3darcade or dk anyway.  Also one break isn't so bad, assuming it's a power of 16 break. Several odd-sized breaks are what kill more modest systems.

It's convoluted and compliacted, but it all draws down to the fact that normal pc games pre-cache all textures, but because all of our textures are external (artwork, frames grabbed off the video)  we have to load a ton, constantly, on the fly.  This makes front ends very video card intensive, even the gdi based ones. 


Out of curiosity, what settings are you guys running mame on when you capture?  I tried it for the heck of it last night and I was getting a puny 3 fps.  Also mame kept complaining about "e:\test" or something to that degree. 

[Buddabing]

Out of curiosity, what settings are you guys running mame on when you capture?

[2600]

Movies are being created fine, but the loop detection seems to be a problem for me on some games.

Aquajack is one.  It cuts out way too soon.

Others, I'm not sure why the BIOS type screens are there.   MK series or radikalb.


Any ideas, I tried changing the movieloops flag, but that wasn't it.