MAME Movie Maker released

[donnyj]

I think it's a good feature....  just wondered what was up =]

[vibez]

Thanks guys. I'll maybe give this movie maker a run next week

[Popcorrin]

Buddabing or anyone else have any advice regarding my earlier post about my resolution issues?

[Buddabing]

Buddabing or anyone else have any advice regarding my earlier post about my resolution issues?

ListGen gets the resolution out of the XML data generated by MAME. If the resolution of the png snapshots is different, it's possible that MAME changes the resolution on the fly. It happens with several games, there was a mini-discussion about it in this thread.

The batch file feeds the resolution parameter directly into MAME. This is done so that the movie frames, and thus the resulting movie, will be exactly the size that the original game was. If you want, edit your batch.bat so that the -resolution parameter is not there. That will let MAME decide what resolution to use (change other appropriate options in mame.ini if applicable) I think you'll find that MAME will run at a much higher resolution and your aspect ratio will be fixed, but at the cost of a lot of time and space.

Also make sure artwork is turned off during movie generation.

[Popcorrin]

I guess I am not so much concerned with the resolution as I am the aspect ratio.  The game is displayed with the correct 4/3 aspect ratio but the resulting png's are not and the movie ends up with the same aspect ratio as the pngs.  With tekken for instance the movie ends up being twice as wide as it is tall.  I know most frontends can stretch the movies to the correct aspect ratio but I would rather create movies that have the correct aspect ratio.
I also tried the moviesquare option and it didn't seem to change a thing in the creation process.  The movies looked identical to what was created without it.

[Howard_Casto]

Buddabing or anyone else have any advice regarding my earlier post about my resolution issues?

ListGen gets the resolution out of the XML data generated by MAME. If the resolution of the png snapshots is different, it's possible that MAME changes the resolution on the fly. It happens with several games, there was a mini-discussion about it in this thread.

Actually.....  even in windowed mode.... windows mame doesn't support "tweaked" resolutions  (ie screen sizes that you normally wouldn't see windows suporting) and thus 90% of the resolutions supplied by the listdetails data are simply ignored when inputted into mame.  They will be close, but not always the same. 

Thus why I simply set them all to 320x240 and let mame figure out the rest.....  i'm assured that the resulting video won't be larger than 320 pixels wide.  You can do the same thing with smaller resolutions..

For an example of this simply type:

mame pacman -window -resolution 255x255x32

pacman will show up with the height being no greater than 255, but the aspect ratio of the game will not be ignored and thus the resulting window will not be square.

I thought you guys knew this.... it's mame 101

You can turn off aspect ratio enforcment of course... but what's the point if mame does all the work for you?

[Popcorrin]

Howard, why do the png's and the resulting video have a totally different aspect ratio than what mame displays while the game is being played?  The aspect ratio on the videos is proportional to the resolution rather than your standard 4/3 aspect ratio. 

[Howard_Casto]

well... afaik  when mame takes a screenshot, it just dumps the video buffer.... snapshots will always be the same size regardless of what resolution you are in when they are taken.  However this isn't the issue here. 

I guess the real question is... is mmm sending vdub the actual resolution of the window, or is it just going by the "resolution" flags you send mame through the command line.  Because as I've pointed out....  the resolution flags essentially have no bearing on actual output.  It would make sense to me at least, to have the video the same size as the window you had mame in when you captured the thing.  Makes for wysiwyg  user-friendlyness

[Buddabing]

well... afaik  when mame takes a screenshot, it just dumps the video buffer.... snapshots will always be the same size regardless of what resolution you are in when they are taken.  However this isn't the issue here. 

I guess the real question is... is mmm sending vdub the actual resolution of the window, or is it just going by the "resolution" flags you send mame through the command line.  Because as I've pointed out....  the resolution flags essentially have no bearing on actual output.  It would make sense to me at least, to have the video the same size as the window you had mame in when you captured the thing.  Makes for wysiwyg  user-friendlyness

Vdub uses the resolution of the pngs. It needs the pngs to be all the same size, which is the cause of the problems we had with resolution-switching games.

I suppose we can remove the -resolution thing. I thought it was important at the time to get the window to be at the same resolution that the original game used, to get the wysiwyg effect.

[Howard_Casto]

well... afaik

[Popcorrin]

I have my ini set up as you suggest and the game looks right while it is playing it's just that the resulting video is squashed.  Just curious, has anyone else tried to make a video of tekken and how did it turn out?

[Silver]

@Popcorrin:

I've just tried Tekken, and yes it looks squashed - or rather, stretched horizontally. The pngs (and thus the video) are all 512 pixels wide by 240 pixels high. (ie stretched). This appears to be similar to other tekken (psx?) games... although interestingly Tekken3 actually switches to 512x480 according to mame.

I'm not sure what the problem is here as the games look fine playing. Either they really are 512x240 and mame is doing some aspect correcting / pixel resizing (although I would have hoped this would happen for the snapshots too) or there is a bug/error where the snaps are being stretched because the game is reporting its size incorrectly at some point.

I think its an error as the game is clearly NOT playing in 512x240.
I also noticed that I appear to be un-able to force the resolution for the tekken games. Is this a driver limitation? eg I can run mslug at 512x240 and looks completely streched - just like the tekken snaps.

[Silver]

RE: Xvid crashing some FE's.

I've made a few test avis that should help to rule out whether its settings in Xvid or Xvid itself.

First off, could someone try the original Xvids with Post-processing turned off. (Startmenu-Xvid-DevoderConfig. Uncheck boxes in post-processing section.

Then it would be great if someone with the FE's could try these files and report back. They are about 50k and just have a few frames from zookeeper:








Note you may need DivX installed to test the last one or two.

[Popcorrin]

@Popcorrin:

I've just tried Tekken, and yes it looks squashed - or rather, stretched horizontally. The pngs (and thus the video) are all 512 pixels wide by 240 pixels high. (ie stretched). This appears to be similar to other tekken (psx?) games... although interestingly Tekken3 actually switches to 512x480 according to mame.

I'm not sure what the problem is here as the games look fine playing. Either they really are 512x240 and mame is doing some aspect correcting / pixel resizing (although I would have hoped this would happen for the snapshots too) or there is a bug/error where the snaps are being stretched because the game is reporting its size incorrectly at some point.

I think its an error as the game is clearly NOT playing in 512x240.
I also noticed that I appear to be un-able to force the resolution for the tekken games. Is this a driver limitation? eg I can run mslug at 512x240 and looks completely streched - just like the tekken snaps.

At least now I know it's not me!

[Silver]

Ok realised I was being lazy...   

I'm not going to look at AtomicFE as I saw a post from the author saying video support was basic and uncomplete....

I've tried my own files in 3DArcade, and DivX files made in Vdub are fine - Xvids are not. They all come up with a script "property not found" error, which I'm guessing is the No width or Height Values supplied,as )p( mentioned....

However, using an Xvid video with a FourCC 'header' for DivX makes the Xvid video decode perfectly. All this does is make the video be decoded by the DivX decoder not the Xvid decoder (As they are both Mpeg4 compliant, we would expect them to be able to decode each other). This suggests to me that the error lies either in the Xvid decoder, or (unlikely) a strange bug in Vdub that only applies to videos with a Xvid FourCC.

If I lost you, don't worry - just in case someone who knows this stuff can help. I will continue looking into it.

[Silver]

@3D arcade users:

A workaround that worked for me is to go into Xvid Decoder Configuration, and select "Compatibility Renderer".

This may be to do with aspect ratio. Does anybody know if 3D Arcade attempts to change the aspect ratio of video files?

[Buddabing]

@3D arcade users:

A workaround that worked for me is to go into Xvid Decoder Configuration, and select "Compatibility Renderer".

This may be to do with aspect ratio. Does anybody know if 3D Arcade attempts to change the aspect ratio of video files?

I think it does. That's why the -moviesquare option was created.

[Silver]

Aha yes I had forgotton about the moviesquare option...

@Popcorrin

the moviesquare option changes the resolution to 256x256 within Vdub, not the size of the pngs from mame. It works for me (tekken comes out square - better but still ugly, but not stretched). This is not a good solution though.

Buddabing do you know why tekken/tekken2 png's come out a completely different size to the game?

Also regarding scripting changes in Vdub 1.6.4 - I think I've missed another change to do with:

VirtualDub.video.SetInputFormat(0);
VirtualDub.video.SetOutputFormat(7) ;

It appears he has changed it to read:

VirtualDub.video.SetInputFormat(5);
VirtualDub.video.SetOutputFormat(5);

This appears to work in 1.6.2 as well, but as there is absolutely no documentation in existence for these that i can find I will contact the author to confirm....

[Popcorrin]

I noticed while playing tekken if you pull up the tab menu and select game information it does give a resolution of 512x240 and tekken2 shows a resolution of 512x480, so I am guessing the png snapshot resolution is directly related to the pixel resolution that the game is outputting and not necessarily what is showing up on the screen.

Silver thanks for  letting me know how the moviesquare option works.

[Buddabing]

Aha yes I had forgotton about the moviesquare option...

@Popcorrin

the moviesquare option changes the resolution to 256x256 within Vdub, not the size of the pngs from mame. It works for me (tekken comes out square - better but still ugly, but not stretched). This is not a good solution though.

Buddabing do you know why tekken/tekken2 png's come out a completely different size to the game?

No idea. Unfortunately I don't have those roms. I would need to play around with putting messages in the png library and logging the output.

Also regarding scripting changes in Vdub 1.6.4 - I think I've missed another change to do with:

VirtualDub.video.SetInputFormat(0);
VirtualDub.video.SetOutputFormat(7) ;

It appears he has changed it to read:

VirtualDub.video.SetInputFormat(5);
VirtualDub.video.SetOutputFormat(5);

This appears to work in 1.6.2 as well, but as there is absolutely no documentation in existence for these that i can find I will contact the author to confirm....

Does the new SetOutputFormat have anything to do with fixing the Xvid decoder issue? What effect does this change make?

I'll make this change in the next binary, probably tomorrow.

[Silver]

Does the new SetOutputFormat have anything to do with fixing the Xvid decoder issue? What effect does this change make?

I'll make this change in the next binary, probably tomorrow.

No the decoder issue seems seperate - and not Vdub related. I can see no difference in the resulting file using 5,5 instead of 0,7 but I have not tested many files. I have emailed the author for more info as the instructions are un-documented.

RE: tekken - I can send you the rom for testing if you wish although its 15megs. I have not found any smaller games that do this yet....

[Buddabing]

Does the new SetOutputFormat have anything to do with fixing the Xvid decoder issue? What effect does this change make?

I'll make this change in the next binary, probably tomorrow.

No the decoder issue seems seperate - and not Vdub related. I can see no difference in the resulting file using 5,5 instead of 0,7 but I have not tested many files. I have emailed the author for more info as the instructions are un-documented.

RE: tekken - I can send you the rom for testing if you wish although its 15megs. I have not found any smaller games that do this yet....

I'd rather you post it to your site, if possible. You can email me a link to it.

[Buddabing]

I have my ini set up as you suggest and the game looks right while it is playing it's just that the resulting video is squashed.  Just curious, has anyone else tried to make a video of tekken and how did it turn out?

Okay, I've gotten the tekken rom and I'm getting the funny pngs.

But Tekken's video is "not 100% accurate" and the game has no sound. Maybe the not 100% part is a hack to get the squished image back into correct aspect. Since the game isn't completely working, we should not expect a perfect movie to be produced, should we?

Is there a 100% working game that has the problem? Does any non-namcos11 game have the problem? Do all the namcos11 games have this same issue? I don't have the roms so I can't tell.

[Popcorrin]

Tekken 2 produces a movie that looks decent.  I believe the pngs had a resolution of 512x480.
 Another game that is fully emulated that produces a video that is somewhat stretched is 1941, albeit not to the degree that tekken does.

[Silver]

Namco system 11 games in mame:

tekken
tekkena
tekkenb
tekken2
tekken2a
tekken2b
souledge
souledga
souledgb
dunkmnia
dunkmnic
xevi3dg
primglex
danceyes
starswep
myangel3
ptblank2


ptblank2,myangel3,starswep do not appear to exhibit the problem.

tekken,tekken2,souledge,dunkmnia,xevi3dg,primglex all do.

I did not test the clones. Interestingly, it appears the the games without the issue do not use 3D, but the others do. So it clearly seems to be an issue with the 3D part of the driver.

Obviously its not listed as a 100% driver, but it would be interesting to know if this is an actual error or in fact a side effect of how the orignal games worked. Its PSX based hardware so I'm not sure who to ask.

@popcorrin - funny, I get the streched pngs produced for tekken2....?

[Silver]

@Buddabing

I was incorrect in my post about the SetInputFormat/Setoutputformat changing. This is incorrect.

The error messagebox is actually caused by an incorrect command line parameter in the batch - in this case the /wait command (In your 1st post of the thread). I believe this is ignored by 1.6.2 and simply errors 1.6.4. Removing the /wait from batch.bat solves the error.

On the plus side, I now have documentation for the SetInput instructions. I believe we should use:

VirtualDub.video.SetInputFormat(0);
VirtualDub.video.SetOutputFormat(0);

This simply autodetects the input and matches the output to this. This works fine in 1.6.2 and 1.6.4
I'll email you the full docs.

[Buddabing]

New binary uploaded.

Changes:

- XVid decoder (-movievideo 3) changed to reduce the size of the resulting avi.
- SetInputFormat(0) and SetOutputFormat(0) instead of 7 in vdb script.

I've also edited the batch.bat on the first page to remove the /wait parameter to VirtualDub.

[donnyj]

ok, I ran a bunch of test before (91) and now all the numbers are off several frames....  frustrating!  Also, I've upgraded to 92 and I cannot get movieloops 3 to work and still show detected loops, I am sure I am doing something wrong, but what?  =[

makemovie               1
minmoviestart           0
minmovielength          800
maxmovielength          10000
movieaudio              1
movievideo              3
skip_warnings           1
movieloops              3
moviesquare             0
moviesnap_directory     E:\\mamesnap
moviecompression        3

mamemm %1 -window -moviesnap_directory E:\\mamesnaps\\%1 -wavwrite %1.wav

BTW, while waiting for the code to settle, I used (abused) MMM to make hi-res titleshots of ALL the non-clones, fun eh?

[Taborious]

Ok, I read the first 2 pages of this post and didn't see anything so I'm going to post the stupid semi-newbie question.

What is this used for? Creating demo game play?

[donnyj]

Ok, I read the first 2 pages of this post and didn't see anything so I'm going to post the stupid semi-newbie question.

What is this used for? Creating demo game play?

For the creation of attract-mode videos, for front end usage (or whatever usage you come up with)

[Buddabing]

ok, I ran a bunch of test before (91) and now all the numbers are off several frames....

[donnyj]

could you kindly try movieloops 3 mode and see if you get the detected loop inserted into the VDB file?

I really want to test out the new detection.

Also, I don't understand how changing the MMM portion would change the actual loops?  I am saying that the physical frame numbers have changed with hand-optimized values 

Keep up the awesome work!

[Buddabing]

could you kindly try movieloops 3 mode and see if you get the detected loop inserted into the VDB file?

I really want to test out the new detection.

Also, I don't understand how changing the MMM portion would change the actual loops?

[DreamWeb]

Huy Buddabing!

This looks like a great program.. and I'm anxious to see it in action.  However, I can't even get listgen to create a makemovies.bat with something inside it.

This is what my listgen.ini looks like.

rompath e:\roms\
mamepath d:\mame\
frontend moviebatch
verbose 0
silent 0
audit_roms 1
use_clones 1
unique 0
us_version_priority 0
world_version_priority 0
strip_description 0
japan_version_priority -1
reuse_mame_data 1
output makemovies.bat
force_uppercase_romnames 0
force_lowercase_romnames 0

My directories are definitely correct.

This is what happens when I run listgen.exe

D:\Documents and Settings\David Pritchett\Desktop\movies>listgen
Calling MAME to get version
MAME version is 0.92
Calling MAME to build listxml.txt
Calling MAME to build gamelist.txt
Calling MAME to build listful.txt
Scanning XML game info
Failed to open catver.ini, list may be inaccurate
Failed to open nplayers.ini, list may be inaccurate
Failed to find gameplay.ini, list may be inaccurate
Processing gamelist.txt
Processing listfull.txt
Writing intermediate file listgen.tmp
Reading intermediate file into filter database
Filtering database into result.tmp
Writing game list to makemovies.bat

D:\Documents and Settings\David Pritchett\Desktop\movies>

I suspect it might be because of my catver.ini, nplayers.ini, and gameplay.ini...  but those are all in the mame root.

I'm missing something obvious, huh?

Thanks!

d.

[Silver]

check the filter.sql file. This is where which games are selected are defined....

Lines starting with -- are ignored.

The first line should be:

select * from gamedata;

make sure it does not have -- in front of it, and make sure all the other lines do. See if that helps.

[DreamWeb]

Thanks, Silver.

That definitely did it.  I now have my makemovies.bat

But.. now there must be a problem with the batch.bat

This is my batch.bat

@if not exist D:\Documents and Settings\David Pritchett\Desktop\movies mkdir D:\Documents and Settings\David Pritchett\Desktop\movies\movies
@if exist D:\Documents and Settings\David Pritchett\Desktop\movies\movies\%1.avi goto end
time /T
@mame %1 -window -makemovie -resolution %2 -wavwrite %1.wav
@if not exist %1.vdb goto end
@\virtualdub\virtualdub /s"%1.vdb" /x
@del %1.wav
@del %1.vdb
@del /Q moviesnp\*.png
@move /Y %1.avi D:\Documents and Settings\David Pritchett\Desktop\movies\movies
time /T
:end

And this is what I get when I run it or makemovies.bat

----

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

D:\Documents and Settings\David Pritchett\Desktop\movies>batch
'and' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

D:\Documents and Settings\David Pritchett\Desktop\movies>time /T
02:07 AM
'mame' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

D:\Documents and Settings\David Pritchett\Desktop\movies>


---

sorry for the ridiculously newbie questions.   And thanks again for the help.

david

[Silver]

Try putting " " around all your directory names in the batch - at least all the ones with spaces in them.

ie:

@if not exist D:\Documents and Settings\David Pritchett\Desktop\movies mkdir D:\Documents and Settings\David Pritchett\Desktop\movies\movies

becomes:

@if not exist "D:\Documents and Settings\David Pritchett\Desktop\movies" mkdir "D:\Documents and Settings\David Pritchett\Desktop\movies\movies"

that should help. (Personally, I don't like having stuff in directories off the desktop - although this makes no difference.)

If you still have problems try using a directory with no spaces.

eg: C:\MameMovies

EDIT: Also its not finding mame - you have to run this batch file from the (buddabing) mame directory.

Goto Start menu, select run, type in "cmd" and hit return. Then change to the directory where mame is (eg "cd C:\Emus\Mame") which is hopefully where you also have buddabings mame and run it there.

[Buddabing]

check the filter.sql file. This is where which games are selected are defined....

Lines starting with -- are ignored.

The first line should be:

select * from gamedata;

make sure it does not have -- in front of it, and make sure all the other lines do. See if that helps.

I need to fix that. ListGen should error out if filter.sql (or user specified SQL file) is not found.

You can also use Windows' 8.3 equivalent filename instead of the quotes. On my computer cd \docume~1 is equivalent to cd "\Documents and Settings".

[Silver]

At one stage my filter.sql was defaulted to (I think from one for your zips?):

select * from gamedata where movieloops='2';

which meant listgen.ini ran fine, but produced a blank output.bat.

And they 8.3 worked fine on my laptop, but I got very confused when it failed on my desktop with files copied over. (Both were Windows XP, NTFS partitions). It turned out that my desktop was configured to not create 8.3 filenames at all - dues to some system-tweak program I ran a while ago. Scratched my head for ages over that one!

[donnyj]

could you kindly try movieloops 3 mode and see if you get the detected loop inserted into the VDB file?

I really want to test out the new detection.

Also, I don't understand how changing the MMM portion would change the actual loops?