Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hi there, people of the Dolphin forums. This is my first time posting here, but I've been using Dolphin for about 5 years now. I'd like to ask a curious question about frame dumping, which is a very important feature to me.

I've been using frame dumping for many years. It's what I always used to record game footage for my video projects. It has been incredibly helpful for me as it was a very handy tool for getting high quality lossless footage with relative ease. And even when my PC specs weren't that good, I could still count on the footage having zero frame drops or slowdowns even on very high graphics settings. And it was all because it allowed me to pick the codec I wanted. My codec of choice has always been Ut Video Codec Suite which is very fast (or at least much faster than the default Uncompressed option) and reliable and has both YUV and lossless RGB options. I believe the last version of Dolphin to have the codec selection option was 4.0-8570.

But then all the future revisions of Dolphin after that did away with the option altogether, which I found disappointing as it essentially leaves me with only two dumping options, neither of which are particularly great: one lossy option that encodes at an extremely low quality and one lossless option that's much slower and clunkier than Ut Video Codec and is not even compatible with either VirtualDub or my video editing software of choice. It also even has some frame drops and slowdowns on occasion.

I want to have the option of choosing my favorite dumping codec but I also don't want to resort to going back to older versions of Dolphin for it as I know the new versions have all the latest improvements. So I would like to ask whether or not I should expect the old option to come back any time soon and if not, whether or not the FFV1 lossless codec can be replaced with Ut Video. There could also be an option of merging old frame dumping code with the newest version of Dolphin, but I have no knowledge of coding and compiling programs so I wonder if anyone experienced in that area could possibly build a version of Dolphin like that?

Sorry, and thank you all for your time.

It is kind of a pain in the ass that we force users to use a single codec since we ship ffmpeg.

However, I do remember the person that knows the framedumping code said there was complications last time it was brought up, but I don't remember what they were. Maybe they'll respond

This codec selection UI won't come back. Microsoft has deprecated it and it is a hell to setup correctly on threaded renderers. But I think we should provide some kind of "ffmpeg config line", so that the user can choose whatever codec ffmpeg supports.

I'd at least like the ability to dump uncompressed back; I used to be able to dump somewhat quickly, but now even dumping at 2x IR slows it down to a crawl. And yes, this is with FFV1--if I'm dumping frames, it's likely I'm going to add the audio and make a full video out of it later at which point it will be compressed--there's no need to compress it twice.

(12-17-2017, 09:02 PM)degasus Wrote: [ -> ]This codec selection UI won't come back. Microsoft has deprecated it and it is a hell to setup correctly on threaded renderers. But I think we should provide some kind of "ffmpeg config line", so that the user can choose whatever codec ffmpeg supports.

Thanks for replying. I really only want to have some sort of choice and flexibility in regards to recording losslessly, as the current available lossless option is not quite my cup of tea. I don't know the first thing about ffmpeg and what it supports, but I would love to be able to use Ut Video in any capacity again.

I would also like an option that lets one choose where the frame dumps will go in case the main folder that Dolphin dumps into is in a rather small hard drive. Dumping uncompressed will make it lose space extremely quickly, so a choice of saving to another place in a much bigger hard drive would be great.

(12-17-2017, 11:47 PM)Windii Wrote: [ -> ]I would also like an option that lets one choose where the frame dumps will go in case the main folder that Dolphin dumps into is in a rather small hard drive. Dumping uncompressed will make it lose space extremely quickly, so a choice of saving to another place in a much bigger hard drive would be great.

An option like that was added a while ago.

The alternative (and my preference) at this point is to just drop framedumping entirely and set up a resource somewhere to tell users how to properly record with OBS or related tools (Which is mostly disabling exclusive fullscreen and not using "Game Capture").

We could just drop the entire problem as well as not having to ship and maintain all of ffmpeg.

Let the tools that are dedicated to this stuff do the job.

(12-18-2017, 03:11 AM)Helios Wrote: [ -> ]The alternative (and my preference) at this point is to just drop framedumping entirely and set up a resource somewhere to tell users how to properly record with OBS or related tools (Which is mostly disabling exclusive fullscreen and not using "Game Capture").

We could just drop the entire problem as well as not having to ship and maintain all of ffmpeg.

Let the tools that are dedicated to this stuff do the job.

Except that would be a major blow to TASing and a disadvantage for some non-TASers too, since other tools dump in real time rather than emulated time (meaning that if your computer lags, the recorded video lags as well).

(12-18-2017, 03:21 AM)JosJuice Wrote: [ -> ]Except that would be a major blow to TASing and a disadvantage for some non-TASers too, since other tools dump in real time rather than emulated time (meaning that if your computer lags, the recorded video lags as well).

^This. Not to mention full-resolution framedumps wouldn't be possible. This would be problematic for texture pack developers without 4K monitors.