MAME Movie Maker released

[Buddabing]

On another note - Due to vdubs highly annoying nature of needed the starting point measured in milliseconds, but the end point in frame number, can you remind me how exactly calculate the start time point? Do you take the exact framerate of the game in use, divide by 2 (as we are making 30fps vids from 60fps games) and mulitply by the number of frames? Or did you assume all games were 60fps? I'm asking as I need to reverse calculate all the start frames from a millisecond reference....

From the code:

The SetRange value is calculated by the nunber of frames to skip times 33.3667. This is equal to #frames to skip/29.97*1000.

Some bad news. MAME version 0.100u3 came out and my -makemovie option is not in it, so it looks like that code was rejected. It's possible, though, that they just haven't looked at my submission yet.

[Silver]

I've heard some people say that code submissions can take a long time to get through. In fact I think I read in the FAQ somwhere that you should wait a while, and if its still not present email and ask and they should be happy to explain why...  I think the key thing is not to start hassling straight away - its only been a very short time since you sent that off I think....

Re: Setrange

Thanks, I should be able to make a complete boundry.txt for all games from that (as a  starting point anyway).

[Skadar]

Feel free to ignore this post completely, but I just can't help it...

18 pages of incredibly hard work for what?  What is the point of all of this?  You guys are doing all of this in order to display a small movie in your MAME front end while you are selecting a game??  Wow.  Seems like you've got time and effort to burn.

I understand the DIY-fever, but this seems a little over the top.

Hey, I like your purple cab. My cab is purple, too.

Please don't belittle other people's projects. It's a form of thread crapping.

Sorry about that.  I re-read my original post and it appears much harsher than what I had intended.  I also thought about what I had said in a much broader context and realized that without experimental projects like this there probably wouldn't be much forward movement in any hobby or niche interest.

Cheers.

[Buddabing]

I've got a functioning mng to avi process now.

1) Run the patched MAME (not BuddaMAME) with the -makemovie option, long enough to get a demo loop. Or just run it with the -ftr option.

2) I wrote a program mng2pngs which splits the output mng from MAME into a series of pngs.

3) I wrote a second program pngs2vdb which detects the loop and creates the VirtualDub script.

4) Run VirtualDub just like normal.

This process takes much much longer per movie than BuddaMAME does, because there is a lot of wastage with creating the mng and splitting it back up.

Once the code is complete I'll upload is somewhere and it can be incorporated into the moviebatch.exe program.

It uses the open source libmng, libpng, and zlib libraries.

[Silver]

This process takes much much longer per movie than BuddaMAME does, because there is a lot of wastage with creating the mng and splitting it back up.

I was afraid of that. Do you think Mamedev would accept an option to spit out pngs? It already happens in screenshot capture (f12) so all you need is for it to happen every frame, and with -ftr we could do the same process missing out the mng?

[Buddabing]

I'll submit a patch for a -screenshot_every_frame option.

This one might have a shot, it could be useful for diagnosing video-related problems.

I think Aaron's trend is to get rid of options rather than adding them. So I am not particularly optimistic.

[2600]

Is the audio in sync or have you not gotten that far?

[Silver]

I'll submit a patch for a -screenshot_every_frame option.

This one might have a shot, it could be useful for diagnosing video-related problems.

I think Aaron's trend is to get rid of options rather than adding them. So I am not particularly optimistic.

hope springs eternal... ;-)

[Silver]

Is the audio in sync or have you not gotten that far?

Mame seems to be very accurate at keeping audio/video in sync. If emaulation is stopped at a certain point, and we've been outputting frames and audio, they have always been perfectly synced. In fact with the buddamame approach the framerate is actually set by the duration of the wav file, and its always spot on....

obviously its possible the mng process might be different, but I doubt it...

[Buddabing]

Is the audio in sync or have you not gotten that far?

I ran my new mng2avi process on Zookeeper and the audio is perfectly in sync.

The conversion process crashed when I enabled artwork, but ran fine with artwork turned off.

It looks like the snapshots are created at the game's native resolution if MAME is run in a window. If that is the case, we can dispense with the whole -resolution business and tell users just to run with -window -noartwork -makemovie -wavwrite.

Then, if the user wants the avis a different resolution than the game's native res, we can use the VirtualDub smart resize filter.

[Silver]

I'll get a basic boundry.txt sorted, which should save a huge amount of time....

Then we will just need to identify games which are incorretly detected and get some manual values. Any chance you could thow out a 0.100 build with your non-mng moveimaker - I'll get a complete 0.100 set of autodetection info.... no worries if its a hassle.

[Buddabing]

Is the audio in sync or have you not gotten that far?

I ran my new mng2avi process on Zookeeper and the audio is perfectly in sync.

The conversion process crashed when I enabled artwork, but ran fine with artwork turned off.

It looks like the snapshots are created at the game's native resolution if MAME is run in a window. If that is the case, we can dispense with the whole -resolution business and tell users just to run with -window -noartwork -makemovie -wavwrite.

Then, if the user wants the avis a different resolution than the game's native res, we can use the VirtualDub smart resize filter.

Unfortunately, my v0.99 and v0.100 source is messed up right now. I've been working on the save states and several drivers are not working.

It'll be a few days before I can sort everything out.

[Silver]

Don't worry about it - probably not worth it if we are transferring over to the mng process. From a 100% curiosity point of view with your zookeeper test - is the output identical to the png process?

You say 0.99 is messed up - does that include the 0.99 binary you have listed for download?

[Buddabing]

That binary should be okay driver-wise, but it doesn't have the two lines moved in the .vdb script.

The zookeeper mng2avi video may have detected a few (maybe 5-10) frames offset from the MMM video. Not enough to matter too much, I think.

[Silver]

Ok I'll use the 98 binary with the 2 line adjustment.

Just to check - will having a boundry.txt of the start/end frames of all the games be helpful if there is a frame offset? I'm guessing not?

[Silver]

If anyones using it... 

...I've updated the Moviebatch program. Now an option to use Virtualdubs internal high quality 2:1 resolution reduction filter. Simply halves the X and Y resolution of all games. Faster the Smartresize.

Also killed couple of bugs - frame rate adjust would only work if you were also resizing, and the running of listgen is not dependant on which path you selected last.

http://www.silverfoxy.plus.com/MovieBatch0.4.exe

[NIVO]

Silver, i can never run moviebatch.exe  becuase i always get a .dll error. And i have the .dll installed, i put it in 2 folders to be safe(windows/system and windows/system32). i had cdbrown send me the files it made so i could work around the issue so i could process some vids. but i have other ideas on hand, so can you tell me how to fix this error so i can use the .exe from you? thanks

[Silver]

Hmmm you shouldn't need that file at all... looks like I've left in some unwanted references and/or missed out some from the vb runtime installer on my site.

I've uploaded a new version of 0.4 (same link as above) which does not need the file  you mentioned - could you try and out and see if it needs something else?

[NIVO]

BAH! hehe, same stupid error. i can run makemovies.bat fine and all that, just cant seem to get this .exe to go

[Silver]

It says the same DLL???

Check you are using the version I just uploaded - it shoudl be 17.5K (or in windows explorer 18K) not 21K big....

EDIT: Woops! My bad - just upped another one - try again!

[NIVO]

just tried again, i get the same error. Silver dont go to the troubles man, i appreciate everything your doing. Incidently, I was fiddling around with manually encoding inside virtualdub, switched to ffdshow for MS_MPEG4 V2 quality, what a difference. Also noticed that nearest neighbor is horrible, switched to bicubic and the image is much cleaner.

[Silver]

If you send me a .vdb file with the compression settings you like in it, I can include it as an option in my prog....

...obviously this doesn't help you at all, as it doesn't work. Not quite sure why at the moment, as the update doesn't even refer to the dll it wants...

Might be worth running the system files setup from Mamewah's site...

[NIVO]

yes ive run that, in fact mamewah working fine, showing my vids and such.

[cdbrown]

When you talk about the vbd file - where do we get that from?  Should we do that "Run job later" and take the codes from there?  NIVO and I have been trying to find a nice sweet spot for encoding the vids and I think with your expertise on vdub we could get a great result.  I like the image quality of the current set of mame vids but don't like them al resized to 256x256 hence losing the aspect.  It would be good to keep the aspect but try and maintain a mx x or y - but most resizes reduce the quality alot.  I wonder if we could also reduce the bitrate of the sound stream.

[NIVO]

or even better cd, kill the audio completely as I like to do hehehe. Ill be jamming to some tunes in the FE anyways so silent vids would do fine(as well as keep the file size down) or looking at it from another view......taking away sound could let us use higher encode for vid in the same amount of space where the sound would have been.  A side note here too, whatsup with snaps looking horrible in mamewah? SO pixelated and icky i cant stand it.

[Silver]

Ok, think i've found the (ridiculous) reason it wants MSSTDFMT.DLL.. I'll try and remove the requirement in future versions.

Anyway in the meantime you need to run:

regsvr32 MSSTDFMT.DLL

from the start/run or a command prompt. This *should* fix it.

VDB files:

Yes the easiest way to get one is the "run job later". If you find a sweet spot that you like/codec you like, just email me the vdb file. As for 256x256... is this your own set, made with -moviesquare? If you use my batch program, you can resize to anything you like while maintaining the aspect ratio. You can set and max X and Y (they can be different).

Audio:

 Removing Audio should be easy - although may be another change to Buddamame's Mame. However:

1) Bear in mind that the audio is low % of the size. in a 1.5 meg avi, its around 100k I think, so you are talking less than 10%. I realise its still wasteful if you don't want audio.

2) We use the audio duration to set the correct frame rate of the video. I've just quickly tested vdub by disabling the audio wav input and it kicked out a file that was incorrect frame rate.

This means that when writing out the vdb file, buddamame (or the future external app when using mng) would have to know the frame rate of the game, or the duration of the wav, to set the correct speed of playback. There may be a way of doing it in Vdub, I'm not sure.

[Buddabing]

I'll add a -movieaudio 3 option to disable audio. -movieaudio 0 means no compression.

[Silver]

Are you able to do anything with the framerate?

[Buddabing]

Are you able to do anything with the framerate?

Probably, but I think that non-default frame rates should be left to the users via vcodec.dat.

[NIVO]

thanks, i wish i wouldve known to fix this. It did the trick, thanks. As far as sound, we have just been using the option "-nosound" for time being, but yes it does throw off the framerates. Its like its playing in slo-mo mode. The good point though, is that the video is quite good, little to no artifacting or post processing is being seen, and thats a good thing hehe. I/we appreciate you fellas tweaking with us to gain much more favorable results. Cheers.

[cdbrown]

Just ran the latest batchmaker0.4 and used the following properties
xvid, quant-3, smartresize 256x256, bicubic, 15fps and the videos being produced are very nice.  I've only used it on about 10 and it's come out great.  All images are clear and keep the original aspect ratio.

Any way to get listgen to remove the mahjong games from the makemovie.bat - really can't be bothered producing a vid for these.  Also can listgen rule out games that don't run properly (11beat).

Cheers
-cdbrown

[Silver]

thanks, i wish i wouldve known to fix this. It did the trick, thanks. As far as sound, we have just been using the option "-nosound" for time being, but yes it does throw off the framerates. Its like its playing in slo-mo mode.

Doesn't running mame with -nosound cause Vdub to not produce a video because it can't find the wav? Or are you manually editing the vdb files?

As soon as buddabing throws out a custom audio patch, I'll add a no-audio patch and provide an option to set the framerate (or work out how to calculate it correctly).

[cdbrown]

I can confirm after talking with NIVO that removing the -wavwrite command from batch.bat that vdub spits it and doesn't produce the video because the second line of the 1%.vdb file looks for 1%.wav.  I may have convinced him to just go ahead with the sound.

[Buddabing]

Any way to get listgen to remove the mahjong games from the makemovie.bat - really can't be bothered producing a vid for these.

[Howard_Casto]

Just ran the latest batchmaker0.4 and used the following properties
xvid, quant-3, smartresize 256x256, bicubic, 15fps and the videos being produced are very nice.

[cdbrown]

Do each of the snapshots in moviesnp correspond to a frame within mame?  The reason is some games have lenghty intro's talking about the story of the game (64street).  The title screen and the following gameplay attract doesn't start until the 5721 png.  Just wondering if I could put that number into the moviemaket.bat so it would start frame there and then detect the loop after that?

[NIVO]

well i edited the output .vdb file for 64street to this:
VirtualDub.subset.AddRange(5721,9243);
goes from title through gameplay footage through to the score table, which is perfect and waht we are looking for.

However 2 key points that it messes up:
#1 audio is way outta sync(but i figured this much as well)
#2 leaves a long black screen end, when it needs to stop immediately after hi score table goes black(which indicates, its about to loop obvioulsy)


*** im beginning to understand the process a bit now hehe, just need to learn what to look for regarding the editing

[Silver]

Each png in the moviesnp dir represents 1 frame of video output from mame.

Virtualdub has some annoying quirks in its script as you have found out.

The addrange command adds the frames you specify in that range - so it added 5721 - 9243 as your case. Unfortuantely, this means vdub has no idea how to sync the audio.

So what actually happens is that Vdub adds all the frames - Addrange (0,9243)
Then it sets the framerate to match the length of audio - SetFrameRate(-1,2)
(-1 matches duration, 2 is skipping every other frame to give us 30fps)
Then we tell it to only output from our startframe: SetRange(23323,0)

The catch is that for some crazy reason, although addrange deals in frames, setrange deals in milliseconds from the start. So Buddamame converts the number of frames to skip to milliseconds and inserts it here.

[Buddabing]

Okay, I've created my own mng2avi utility. It takes a mng which was created from MAME and an optional wav which was also created from MAME, and produces an AVI file.

It should support all the most recent modifications, ie.

1) -moviesquare support for 128, 256, etc.
2) moved clear filters to top of .vdb file.
3) added -movieaudio 3 to disable audio even when a wav is present.

So now you can create movies even with an unmodified MAME, so long as your mame supports mng output. (version v0.100 or later)

As of right now you still can't get synced-up sound without a modified MAME.

Here's a link to my mng2avi utility

Source is included.

[NIVO]

thx budda, will take a look at it