How do you capture video of your games?

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

I searched java-gaming.org forum and strangely enough I haven’t found any tutorial/topic about capturing game video.

I managed to find http://bigosaur.com/blog/17-making-libgdx-youtube-video showing how to capture each frame in libgdx and convert them later to movie at command line. Looks doable but seems so tedious.

There’s also http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenGL_Programming/Video_Capture tutorial explaining how to capture opengl stream outside of application. I guess it should work ok for libgdx desktop app.

I would love to know what others use for capturing game video.
Is there easier solution I missed?

#2

Do you mean so the user can activate a built in record function?

If so, no idea.

If not, FRAPS. lol

#3

Thanks for quick answer.

No. I want to record teaser of game I developed so I can post it on youtube.

That’s windows only. I’m looking for Linux solution, preferably free.

#4

I am at a loss then, I only use Linux for coding, windows for everything else.

Currently I have no reason to record anythng on linux so I have never actually looked into it, however dermetfan records his tutorials on his linux distro, maybe send him a PM and find out what screen capturing software he uses. I think it could be bandicam.

The only free recording software I know of is Open Broadcaster Software, which is Windows only. What about using Wine as a temporary solution?

#5

recordMyDesktop.

What distro do you use?
Try: sudo apt-get install recordmydesktop

#6

If you use recordMyDesktop, here is a shell script I found somewhere online, which combines [icode]xwininfo[/icode] and recordmydesktop to make it possible to simply click on a window to record that window:


#!/bin/bash
recordmydesktop -windowid $(xwininfo |grep "Window id:"|sed -e "s/xwininfo\:\ Window id:\ // ;s/\ .*//" ) --workdir ${PWD##*/rmd} -fps 60 -o $1

usage:
[icode]
./record.sh videoFile.ogv
[/icode]

I hope it works for you ;D

#7

[quote]The only free recording software I know of is Open Broadcaster Software, which is Windows only. What about using Wine as a temporary solution?
[/quote]
Looks more complicated than other solutions I found so far (see my first post in this thread).

[quote]What distro do you use?
Try: sudo apt-get install recordmydesktop
[/quote]
Have just tried gtk-recordmydesktop (ui version of that tool). Works without problems but it looks like it is unable to record at 60fps. Ui allows setting fps at 50fps max.

Anyway my assumption is that to produce high quality video we need a solution that fetches every single game frame exactly once. Screen capturing software does not guarantee that. Solution (with libgdx) described here http://bigosaur.com/blog/17-making-libgdx-youtube-video makes sure that you fetch each frame exactly once. It just puzzles me that it is so cumbersome so I concluded that there must be better solution that everybody uses.

#8

You almost can’t notice any difference between 50 or 60 fps, also you can force your game to run with 50 fps while you record.

#9

Bandicam, Fraps for video files

LiceCAP for Gif files

Done.

#10

When I was on ubuntu I used kazam, it was fast, easy, and recorded nicely. Then used ffmpeg to convert to lower qualities to make it smaller.
However now that I’m on arch kazam doesn’t want to record at any higher than 5 fps. I installed from AUR so I suppose I couldn’t expect any more. I use qt-recordmydesktop now, it works nicely.

Funny random story: last night I tried installing windows again and, to do so, I had to erase my Ubuntu partition for space. Never use it anymore anyways. However I forgot that I chose to still use the grub installed automatically with Ubuntu when I was installing Arch, so essentially I deleted my boot loader ::).
After spending a couple hours trying to install grub through Arch live usb to a new /boot partition I ended up just reinstalling Ubuntu on a 20 gb partition with grub on that /boot partition just to get a boot loader back. Suppose I’ll try to reinstall windows again tonight as I don’t have to worry about deleting my ubuntu partition now…

Come to think of it, why am I trying to reinstall windows anyways?..

Edit:
Oh yeah I wanted to try out Terraria. What can I say, I like to waste my time.

#11

Without changing the topic, side note:
Slyth2727, Terraria is awesome, I’ve played (let me check steam…)
…what, seriously, I couldn’t have!? Over 500 hours of Terraria.
Plus there are a some good mods for it out there which I haven’t tried.
Although maybe not worth the trouble of partition a HD and reinstalling windows…

To the OP, like ricardo said, the fps does matter to most people when in-game, but won’t really matter on youtube since youtube caps the fps to 30 anyway.

#12

This is what I do, too :wink:

Awesome game :smiley:

#13

I use jMonkeyEngine, and that has a class for capturing video.

#14

It is easy to restore grub with a live cd and you can install a small app/tool with interface to help you called Boot-Repair.

#15

Kazam is a fairly fast video recording application for Linux. You could use that.

  • Jev
#16

Oh yeah… I forgot about that. Brain fart.
Anyways, here I am trying to convert my GPT table to MBR. May wind up having to delete everything just to reinstall Windows ::). Ah well, no biggie really. You know, I mayyy try Gentoo this time around too. If I’m not back in 5 days 1 of 2 things may have happened:

  1. I killed myself trying to install Gentoo.
  2. I went insane trying to install Gentoo and had to be retained by special forces before I killed myself and my family. Not to mention the computer.

Back on topic:
What distro are you using? That could help us tell you what would best fit.

#17

Nowadays I just use Arch Linux most of the time, but when I first tried out the application I was running Xubuntu 12.04.

  • Jev
#18

[quote]What distro are you using? That could help us tell you what would best fit.
[/quote]
I’m using Linux Mint but it doesn’t matter - I can always run any distro from live-cd in a few minutes or just build any tool from source if it is open source.

#19

[quote]I use jMonkeyEngine, and that has a class for capturing video.
[/quote]
Thanks for that tip. I’ve found this article about capturing video in jmonkey.
http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/wiki/doku.php/jme3:advanced:capture_audio_video_to_a_file

It’s as easy as I imagined the only problem is that it requires jmonkey.
I guess there should be similarly simple solution for libgdx or even for lwjgl.

In general thanks for all screen-capturing tools ideas but it definitively is not the way I want to use.
When I wrote about external capturing tool I thought about something that could plug into opengl driver and capture screenshots of opengl frame after each eglSwapBuffers call.