MAME Movie Maker released

[Buddabing]

Why the resistance to just use a separate directory?  Then it won't delete ANYTHING it shouldn't?

Just a thought...

True enough. I'm already adding fourteen options to MAME, what's the big deal about one more? I guess it won't be too difficult to add a "-moviesnapdir" directory.

also, when I attempt to compile mame with the changes, I get a mame that recognizes the new switches but doesn't act on them???

What am I doing wrong?

I don't really understand "doesn't act on them". Are you calling mame with -makemovie  on the command line or makemovie 1 in your mame.ini? If not, the movie won't be created.

Try moving your compiled version out and replacing it with my precompiled binary, changing nothing else, then see if you get the same result. Then post what command line you are using as well as the relevant parts of your mame.ini.

[donnyj]

I dropped the new compiled version into the spot where your compiled version was, and it doesn't complain about the invalid switches, but it doesn't save snaps or close, it just keeps running until I stop it.

[Buddabing]

I dropped the new compiled version into the spot where your compiled version was, and it doesn't complain about the invalid switches, but it doesn't save snaps or close, it just keeps running until I stop it.  Then there will be 1 snap created.

I don't understand what you mean about putting your precompiled version in place of the one I made, yes your version works, it's just for a different set of roms than I have, and I wanted to try an i686-optimized version.

Thank you VERY much for all your hard work on this, it's a marvellous project.

I didn't mean to be offensive when I asked about resistance to changing its behaviour 

 :'(my bad

I took no offense. Resistance to change (Howard would call it "pigheadedness") is a personality trait of mine.

Please post:
The command line where you call mame from a batch file or typed in.
The relevant portions of mame.ini.
What ROM you are trying to run.
Which version (0.89 or 0.90)

[donnyj]

I am using both the "sample" batch file and the "what I use" mame.ini.

[Buddabing]

I am using both the "sample" batch file and the "what I use" mame.ini.  The only difference is the .exe .

Let me ask this way.  In order to compile a 90u3 binary...

Download official 90 source.  Patch u1, u2 then u3 patches.  Extract the movie maker (90) source over the top of the patched 90u3 source, replacing any duplicate files with the movie maker files (makefile, etc.) then make.

Something wrong with that procedure?

Well I've learned how to compile mame, takes about 30 minutes an attempt, but it's a learning experience =]

edit: ok, narrowing down the problem, now trying just "out of the box 0.90" source with MMM 090 source added, no patching....


hmmm, isn't the usrintrf.c supposed to be in src overwriting the one in there?  trying that....

Yep, looks like the path on usrintrf.c is wrong, that'll cause the problems you describe.

[donnyj]

Woohoo, the P4 u3 version is MUCH faster on my system.....

[Silver]

Woohoo, the P4 u3 version is MUCH faster on my system.....

how do you mean? the p4 specific speedups or something else?

[donnyj]

Just the p4 speedups, I believe....

Woohoo, the P4 u3 version is MUCH faster on my system.....

[Buddabing]

Okay,

I have updated version 0.90 of my MAME build. I added an option -moviesnap_directory (default value movisnap) which will cause the movie snapshots to be put in a separate directory from the normal screen shots. I also put in a del /Q movisnap\*.png in the sample batch.bat on the first page of this thread.

The purpose of adding the new option was so that people don't accidentally delete the screen shots they already have.

In order to compile your own optimized build, all you should have to do is extract this into the MAME root directory and run make. (after putting your own optimizations in the makefile)

[Popcorrin]

I upgraded from version .89 to .90 and I seem to be having more issues with the updated version. I have the movieloops set to 1 but for alot of the videos it seems that the loop is not detected. Also I noticed on occasion I get an error during the process at the point where it looks for the, e.g. cot00000.png and says it can not find it.  I open up the snap directory and the reason it can't find the specified snapshot is because it is no longer there.  It seems as if the first 2000 or so of the 10000 snapshots have been deleted.  I have no idea why this happens?

[Buddabing]

I upgraded from version .89 to .90 and I seem to be having more issues with the updated version. I have the movieloops set to 1 but for alot of the videos it seems that the loop is not detected. Also I noticed on occasion I get an error during the process at the point where it looks for the, e.g. cot00000.png and says it can not find it.  I open up the snap directory and the reason it can't find the specified snapshot is because it is no longer there.  It seems as if the first 2000 or so of the 10000 snapshots have been deleted.  I have no idea why this happens?

Okay, please post the relevant portions of your batch.bat and your mame.ini, and what rom you are using. Also, try adding -moviesnap_directory snap to your mame.ini.

[Popcorrin]

It has happened on cotton boomerang for instance.  It seems to happen with the higher resolution games.

My batch file and mame ini. are below.

@if exist f:\videos\%1.avi goto end
time /T
@rem @copy /Y dummyvdb.txt %1.vdb
@start /min /wait mame %1 -window -makemovie -resolution %2 -wavwrite %1.wav
@start /min /wait \virtualdub\virtualdub /s"%1.vdb" /wait /x
@rem @mame %1 -window -makemovie -resolution %2 -wavwrite %1.wav
@rem @\virtualdub\virtualdub /s"%1.vdb" /wait /x
@del %1.wav
@del snap\*.png
@move /Y %1.avi f:\videos
time /T
:end

intmakectrl             1
extmakectrl             0
noshowctrl              0
makemovie               1
minmoviestart           200
minmovielength          800
maxmovielength          10000
moviethreshold          2
movieaudio              0
movievideo              3
skip_warnings           1
movieloops              1
moviesquare             0

[Buddabing]

It has happened on cotton boomerang for instance.

[rerstad]

OK, not sure what's going on.  Downloaded your compiled mame v.89 and the other necessary apps.  Made the bat files, just like you say, made mame.ini just like what you say (almost--more on that in a minute) and last night things seemed to be going fine.  I was making movies.  Went to bed thinking it was churning away and when I got up it was stuck on 1944 needing me to type "OK"--I had forgotten to add skip_warnings.  Did that, so now the whole setup complies with what's at the beginning of this thread and it won't make any movies.  It will startup and run and just keep running.  I've been trying to make a mspacman movie for more than an hour with no luck.  I can clearly see that it's cycled through the screens several times.

One other thing, am I supposed to be seeing error messages in the command window?  First it says "unable to open the keyboard device (error 32) then a bunch of "access denied"s.  When it worked yesterday, I would also get "unable to close the keyboard device (error 6)" and "System cannot find the file specified".

It's a great app with promise.  I'm sure I'm just overlooking something dumb, but not sure what it is.

[rerstad]

OK, upgraded to your compiled version .90 and it only took 4 minutes to do mspacman, so progress!

[Popcorrin]

It has happened on cotton boomerang for instance.

[Buddabing]

It turns out I don't have the cotton2 rom. I tried recoding the loop detection to only check the picture data. No change. I think the larger games have images that are just too complex to repeat exactly in a demo loop. What I could to is to try sampling the image at, say, 100 different points, then detecting a match if a succeeding frame matches all 100 points within a certain tolerance. Storage required would be max 400 bytes times 10000 frames= 4 meg, which is a bit more than currently which is about 60 bytes per frame.

Rerstad: Please post back if you need further assistance. My 0.89 code is messed up right now from testing, I'll post a new executable soon.

[Buddabing]

If my snap directory was an issue why would the movie creation work fine for some games?  The error I described happens maybe 10% of the time.  Otherwise everything usually goes pretty well.
I was kind of curious how the process worked regarding loop detection and deletion of the png's.  Once the program detects the loop does it then delete the png's from the snap directory that are prior to first frame of the loop?  Then does it send the information to virtual dub and virtual dub then looks for let's say cot01254.png.  If this was the case the problem may reside in that there is a problem with the info sent to vdub.  Instead of vdub looking for cot01254.png, it is looking for cot00000.png.  Every error I have gotten is that vdub can't find the ***00000.png frame.

I may totally off base here, but it was just a thought.
Thanks for your help and I will try setting up the moviesnap directory as you suggested.

The first thing the movie maker code does is delete cot*.png. Then it starts creating snapshots named cot00000.png, cot00001.png, etc. If, for some reason, MAME can't create the snapshot for cot00000, then the movie will fail to create, since the .vdb script expects the snapshots to start with 00000.

MAME may not be able to create cot00000 because:
1) out of disk space?
2) no write permission to directory?
3) insufficient access privileges?
4) who knows?

Please reproduce this error on a different ROM, since I don't have cotton2. Then, create a log file (add -log to the MAME command line) and look at the error.log file. If something doesn't pop out at you, zip it up and email it to me at buddabing at houston dot rr dot com.

[Howard_Casto]

I wanted to point out that on further use I've ran into similar issues.  Nearly any game with a complex intro fails loop detection, or detects the loop improperly.  Most fighters fail as they have complex intros and several transitions (attract mode, demo mode, highscore mode ect). 

Is it my understanding that you are doing a simple getpixel point check then?  Imho this isn't gonna work well at all.  Disable compression (as others have suggested) and do crc checks of the spit out image files.  Only when the frame is exactly, exactly, exactly the same will the crc check pass. You'll have to do a get pixel test on top of that to get the color level (make sure it isn't matching on an all black or all white screen).  Of course, depending upon how accurate the render method is, that may cause even worse performance, I dunno. 

[rerstad]

More problems with loop detection and version .90 last night.  I got stuck on Angelkds for 3 1/2 hours last night. Had to escape out of it and now appears I'm stuck on Anteater.

Again, the bat  and ini files are just as specified.

[Buddabing]

I wanted to point out that on further use I've ran into similar issues.  Nearly any game with a complex intro fails loop detection, or detects the loop improperly.  Most fighters fail as they have complex intros and several transitions (attract mode, demo mode, highscore mode ect). 

Is it my understanding that you are doing a simple getpixel point check then?  Imho this isn't gonna work well at all.  Disable compression (as others have suggested) and do crc checks of the spit out image files.  Only when the frame is exactly, exactly, exactly the same will the crc check pass. You'll have to do a get pixel test on top of that to get the color level (make sure it isn't matching on an all black or all white screen).  Of course, depending upon how accurate the render method is, that may cause even worse performance, I dunno. 

I thought the compression was lossless. Lossy compression could indeed cause imprecise loop detection, espcially on larger images such as propcycl.

The current loop detection does a md5 checksum over the entire file. As a test, I modified it to do the checksum over only the image data. Same results.

Instead of the sampling method, I'll look into creating lossless frames instead. Performance may not be very good.

[Silver]

PNG files use completely lossless compression - I believe it is part of the PNG spec.

The only way these files are different would be if the rendering process of the games in mame produces non-repeatable images, which I find extremely unlikely. (Or they really are different).

If there is an obvious loop that is not detected, then I would simply recommend comparing two pngs from appropriate spots. There may be something unusual like a pixel or line of 'garbage' rendered to the screen which prevents identical comparisons.

Note if any of the games mentioned change their resolution during the attract loop, it will not work (each time the resolution changes, the loop detection restarts and previous frames are wiped.) I know cool borders (cbaj) does this as the logo is a different screen resolution to the rest - although it does find a loop later on in the attract which looks nice. A single resolution change in bootup is fine as its not part of a loop.
A simple way to test for a resolution change is to not delete all the snaps, the open the first one in Vdub manually and it will tell you if it finds pngs in the sequence with a different resolution. (note buddabings more recent patches get rid of most of these errors)

The fact that this process works for so many games suggests the difference is with the specific games.

On a side note, I would also argue that a lossy compression for SINGLE images would most probably produce an IDENTICAL file given EXACTLY the same input images - I know this is true for jpgs. So it would actually still work..... It would only fall over if the lossy compression was designed for mulitple frames (video codecs) and used info from frames before and after as well. Howver, this is probably beside the point.

[rerstad]

I think I'm having some problems with moviesnp and the precompiled version of .90.  I get an initial error that it can't find c:\mame\moviesnp\****.png, then, even those it completed said that it could not find the moviesnp file to delete.  When I went into the moviesnp file, it was huge--apparently nothing was being deleted, which I assume it should be. If I have to stop (like when it took more than an hour and was still running anteater), I get an error that vdub can't find the ****.png frame.  May be the same problem Popcorrin discussed.

[Buddabing]

I think I'm having some problems with moviesnp and the precompiled version of .90.

[sWampy]

I'm trying to compile 90 with this, and keep getting the following error.

Compiling src/common.c...
src/common.c: In function `save_movie_snapshot':
src/common.c:2016: `FILETYPE_MOVIESHOT' undeclared (first use in this function)
src/common.c:2016: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
src/common.c:2016: for each function it appears in.)
src/common.c: In function `detect_png_resolution_change':
src/common.c:2169: `FILETYPE_MOVIESHOT' undeclared (first use in this function)
src/common.c: In function `detect_loop':
src/common.c:2231: `FILETYPE_MOVIESHOT' undeclared (first use in this function)
src/common.c: In function `generate_vdb_file':
src/common.c:2308: `FILETYPE_MOVIESHOT' undeclared (first use in this function)
make: *** [obj/mame/common.o] Error 1

I unzipped clean .90 source, made it, it compiled fine, unzipped mame90 on top, typed make, and got  this error.

[rerstad]

If the moviesnp is a file, it should be a directory.
Do a dir moviesnp. If it shows one file, delete it then do mkdir moviesnp. Mame is supposed to create the directory if it doesn't exist, there's probably a program bug that prevented this.

There is a moviesnp directory that mame apparently created that appears in the mame folder.  I'll try deleting it and letting mame make it again.  It was full of TONS of pngs.  The pngs aren't being deleted when the movie is made.

[Buddabing]

There is a moviesnp directory that mame apparently created that appears in the mame folder.

[rerstad]

The movie snapshots aren't deleted unless you have something in your batch.bat to delete them. And, the directory name you put in the batch.bat has to match the moviesnap_directory parameter, or again the pngs won't be deleted.

I'm very new to all of this,

[Buddabing]

Jan 26, 2005 11:00 CST

I've uploaded a new version.

I fixed swampy's compile error.

Silver: The png compression is not lossless. The png library allows different levels of compression, including lossless, but MAME always uses compressed data.

I made a small change to which creates a new option -moviecompression. If set to 1 (default), the pngs will be compressed like they are now. If set to zero, the pngs will be uncompressed.

[Popcorrin]

When I tried adding moviesnap_directory moviesnp I got the following error:unknown option moviensap_directory on line 23 of file mame.ini, ignoring line.
Mame by default is using the snap directory and there doesn't seem to be anyway to change it.  I am using the mame.90 exe.  It doesn't bother me that it uses the snap directory, but I thought if I were to use the moviesnp drctry it might fix the problems I was having.

[Buddabing]

When I tried adding moviesnap_directory moviesnp I got the following error:unknown option moviensap_directory on line 23 of file mame.ini, ignoring line.
Mame by default is using the snap directory and there doesn't seem to be anyway to change it.

[Popcorrin]

That was a typo.   I had it spelled correctly. 

I reproduced the same problem I was having earlier with cotton2.  I was using columns 97.  It has the same resolution as cotton2.  I noticed that right away after the batch file starts that in the command line window that I get the error 'The system cannot find the path specified', and this error repeats 6 times.  If I open my snap directory it shows the png's starting at col00006.png,  the first 6 are missing.  Later on in the process I get the same error again.  At this point the error will repeat 100's of times. 

I am not sure what is going on but it sounds like a problem with my system.  Also I noticed the png's are at the resolution of 352x224 and not 704x480.  Not sure if this is right or not. I have been using the mame.90 exe that I downloaded a couple of days ago.  Maybe I will try downloading again.

[Silver]

I am not sure what is going on but it sounds like a problem with my system.  Also I noticed the png's are at the resolution of 352x224 and not 704x480.  Not sure if this is right or not. I have been using the mame.90 exe that I downloaded a couple of days ago.  Maybe I will try downloading again.

Not sure about the missing 6 pngs (sounds odd - unless your system has a delay when creating the dir??? or if the dir is already made - it does sound odd.) But don't worry about the resolution - there are loads of games where mame reports its big, but the *actual* screen is smaller.  Not sure why...

[Buddabing]

That was a typo.

[Popcorrin]

I just downloaded the .90 binary again and replaced only the exe and everything seems to be working much better now.  I tried columns97 again and I did not get the error.   

I noticed something strange though. I opened up the snap directory and the first six pngs were there.  I noticed that the resolution of the 1st six pngs were at the resolution of 320x224 and then png's 6-1174 were at the resolution 352x224 and the remainder of the pngs were at the 704x480 resolution.
 Before when I had the problems the first six pngs would not be in the snap directory if I stopped the movie somewhere between frames 6-1174.  If I stopped the movie between 1174-10000 then frames 0-1174 would be missing.  Not sure what would be causing this.

One last question.  With the new binary what do I want to have the moviecompression set to?  If possible it might not hurt to see all of your settings in the mame.ini.  There are alot of new options in there.  Not sure what moviethreshold is for either?

Thanks!

[Popcorrin]

Update:  I spoke too soon.  Vdub ended up choking on columns 97.  It said it had to do with the difference in resolutions between the 1st image and image 1175.

[Popcorrin]

I got to thinking.  It must not be detecting the loop then, because I think in a previous post you stated that the resolution changes usually aren't a problem as they are not part of the loop.

[Buddabing]

Update:

[Popcorrin]

Okay, sending it now.  Thanks.

[Silver]

Incidentally - hope I'm not confusing things - but I've just run colmns97 through and it found a loop and made a nice video no problem. This is with standard settings, using Buddabings own mame 0.89 compile dated 11th Jan 2005. Not sure if that means the error is in 0.90 only or is something else......

EDIT: A rerun with identical settings with the latest 0.90 (your build) produces the " image 1248 resolution (704x480) does not match the 1st image (302x240)" error in vdub. Looks like the resolution work around is not overwriting the earlier png's in the newer build?