Frame Dumping: Can we have the codec selection option back please?

[fintogive]

(05-25-2018, 09:32 PM)Renazor Wrote: Could someone explain some of these limitations and issues for us to know what you guys are talking about ? Thanks. I did look around and didn't find much.

EDIT: Yes me, but also the lurkers, newcomers.

it saids it in the title.  basically the codecs are limited to what dolphin is pre set for.  before that  people were able to use what ever codec they wanted to use such as lagarith lossless video codec for example. 

[JMC47]

Part of the problem is that Dolphin has changed over the years to output video better. A lot of codecs don't support Variable Frame-Rate output, which is why this mess started.

[fintogive]

(05-28-2018, 12:31 AM)JMC47 Wrote: Part of the problem is that Dolphin has changed over the years to output video better.  A lot of codecs don't support Variable Frame-Rate output, which is why this mess started.

well what about making frame rate static temporarily wile recording so it can support it.  or what do you mean by variable?  as in the frame rate changes all the time or  the frame rate doesn't render the usual 30 or 60fps  and its set to 45 fps or 37fps for example.

[Zexaron]

(05-29-2018, 08:01 AM)fintogive Wrote: well what about making frame rate static temporarily wile recording so it can support it. or what do you mean by variable? as in the frame rate changes all the time or the frame rate doesn't render the usual 30 or 60fps and its set to 45 fps or 37fps for example.

It has to make an identical recording, any fluctuations of frames in the game have to be properly included in the resuting video. Unless you have powerful enoguh hardware to run stable frames, and even then it's not exactly 60.000000 all the time I suspect.

I do have video transcoding background quite a bit, dealth with ffmpeg a lot, so I might take a look at this, maybe figure something out, not sure if I could program it myself, but hey better than nothing.

(12-18-2017, 04:32 PM)Helios Wrote: No, I just don't really think that Dolphin does a particularly good job of frame dumping on our biggest platform by far and since nobody wants to fix it, best leave it to the tools that can do the job better.

(05-25-2018, 09:42 PM)JosJuice Wrote: Please don't say "us" when you only mean yourself.

That's why I was asking, what are the flexibilities that are lacking, problems with variable frame rate, new video file when window gets resized (but half the files end up being invalid or less than a second long), how it is connected to TAS movies, etc,

Me or anyone else can't do much without knowing in detail what you guys want fixed.

Even if it's only myself, well I'd like to figure it out and see what I can do, better than nothing. I don't think it's just the codec choice, some of it I did figure out.

Then some people said they use some tools afterward, some people said they want lossless, what are the goals, what are these movies being used for except for just stuff like letsplay ?

Maybe it's too general stuff for this thread, where could I read more about this then?

[fintogive]

(05-29-2018, 08:45 AM)Renazor Wrote: It has to make an identical recording, any fluctuations of frames in the game have to be properly included in the resuting video. Unless you have powerful enoguh hardware to run stable frames, and even then it's not exactly 60.000000 all the time I suspect.

I do have video transcoding background quite a bit, dealth with ffmpeg a lot, so I might take a look at this, maybe figure something out, not sure if I could program it myself, but hey better than nothing.

well ok.  but isnt that normal? frame dumping naturally slows the emulator down. 

[Zexaron]

Allright, could try looking at GPU accelerated encoding, but do you need the format to be AVI for anything particular ?

[fintogive]

(05-30-2018, 01:56 AM)Zexaron Wrote: Allright, could try looking at GPU accelerated encoding, but do you need the format to be AVI for anything particular ?

The avi container is fine.  i honestly dont care as long as i can use any codec preferably lagarith lossless codec at 4k resolutions.

Thank you for looking in to this btw!  much appreciated!

[Zexaron]

(05-30-2018, 07:33 PM)fintogive Wrote: The avi container is fine.  i honestly dont care as long as i can use any codec preferably lagarith lossless codec at 4k resolutions.

Thank you for looking in to this btw!  much appreciated!

Actually, it's more about how the feature behaves with a container format under the hood, while from the outside it may look good, it may not be so nice on the inside, if the same or more framedumping features rewritten in a better way could be achieved in the more modern container then the only thing holding the use of it would be if the users want AVI for something specific or the specific Dolphin Emulator nature might only play nice with it. But I already realized there was an option added to override AVI container, so it doesn't seem to be a hard requirement.

There's some figuring out to do first, whether there is some lower level requirement the way Dolphin works, not necessairly this current framedumping implementation, this one might prefer AVI as it was designed with AVI in mind, hence called AVIDump internally, but a better and modern rewrite may not, in that case it would be only to the nature of Dolphin of what the limitation are, that's a bit harder to accurately predict (for a newbie like me), but unless it's attempted it can't be known for sure, unless other people thought and looked into this and know about where limitations are, that said, I'm pretty sure a lot can be done before reaching such limitations, if they exist.

Maybe now is a good time we should move the discussion to the development section. Since there isn't one like this, I've created a thread there: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-researching-framedumping-issues-expectation-and-potential-solutions

Not just for developers, needs user feedback of what exactly are the problems and what are, use cases, problems with other tools etc