Screencap Trainer

Agent ME · Post by **Agent ME** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 12:36 pm

Yeah... I got a debug kit xbox, with 128 mb ram, and if I use the movie capture tool at full screen, the most I'll get in Halo2 will be 5-15 fps.

DWells55 · Post by **DWells55** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 12:43 pm

Which leads you to wonder, how'd Bungie do it? Force the game not to skip frames, render a scripted sequence with frame dropping, and speed up the first one's video and stitch the audio and video together?

Agent ME · Post by **Agent ME** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 12:45 pm

That's what I was wondering for a long time too.

I think either
A) They have capture cards.
or
B) The shiny see through development kits have a few more pieces of hardware that help speed up and let it film laglessly.

xbox7887 · Post by **xbox7887** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 12:53 pm

The difference between how I am doing it vs. Bungie's way is a little different. My way is to directly capture the framebuffer to the hdd at an average of 22fps which requires no RAM. Since you need more RAM to capture vid using the XDK, it tells you that everything is done on the fly....meaning the image is read from the framebuffer and dumped into another temp buffer to be unswizzled and then dumped into a final buffer where the image is complete and ready to be cached to the hdd or sent out via LAN (which is even slower). Now while they may only use one temp buffer instead of two, reading from the framebuffer and deswizzling on the fly, that still takes a decent amount of processing power when its multiplied by the sheer volume of pictures you will be caputuring any given time. Therefore it is much better to just dump the raw data as I am doing, and use your computer to assemble video.

DEHC · Post by **DEHC** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 12:56 pm

capture a bumch of images at once.

Agent ME · Post by **Agent ME** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 12:58 pm

So the reason that the Movie Capture tool lags so much is that its trying to deswizzle on the fly?

/me patiently waits for Xbox7887's movie trainer.

dakisback4 · Post by **dakisback4** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 12:59 pm

if you did that wouldnt you run out of space on your hard drive within 5-10 minutes

xbox7887 · Post by **xbox7887** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 1:02 pm

Well do the math...1.17 megs per pic, ~22fps, so 22*1.17 megs is 25.74mb/s. Say you have 4 gigs on your E drive cleared out for video. 4*1024/25.74=159 seconds....159/50 = 3 minutes of 640x480 fullscreen capture.

Each minute would require around 1500mb of storage.

Snave · Post by **Snave** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 1:10 pm

Hmmm.. so i couldn't record my 2v2 20 minute mlg matches then?

But couldn't you just store them on a different partition? there's plenty of room in my F:\ partition

dakisback4 · Post by **dakisback4** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 1:12 pm

wow i would only be able to make a 20 second video before my xbox died

btw it would only be 2.65 secs before you run out

Agent ME · Post by **Agent ME** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 1:17 pm

Maybe there could be a 320x240 version of the trainer that saves video as 320x240 sized images to save space and FPS, or some resolution in between 320x240 and 640x480?

Or maybe record at 16bpp instead of 24bpp.

Snave · Post by **Snave** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 1:21 pm

Agent ME wrote:Maybe there could be a 320x240 version of the trainer that saves video as 320x240 sized images to save space and FPS, or some resolution in between 320x240 and 640x480?

Or maybe record at 16bpp instead of 24bpp.

Doing that would decrease the framerate as the trainer would have to resize the image on the fly.

Agent ME · Post by **Agent ME** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 1:23 pm

I mean instead of saving the whole frame buffer, just save every other pixel in the framebuffer. THe Xbox Movie Capture tool has that type of feature and it drastically increases the framerate.

thefreindly0ne · Post by **thefreindly0ne** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 1:25 pm

how does a trainer work????????????? i tried to pm xbox ut he never answered back

Snave · Post by **Snave** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 1:25 pm

Saving every other pixel would make it look.. very blocky to say the least

thefreindly0ne.. read the first post before asking how to work it..

mc-2-elite · Post by **mc-2-elite** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 1:27 pm

Agent ME wrote:
mc-2-elite wrote:
OwnZ joO wrote:
And if your xbox has a debug BIOS running, and you have a recent version of the Microsoft Xbox SDK installed somewhere on your computer, you can simply doube-click deswizzle.bat, and it will automatically get the screencap.raw straight off of your xbox and do all the needed stuff until you get the image.bmp on your desktop!
Wouldn't that be kinda pointless if you're already in debug mode? Can't you just use XIG?
Not if you have a 1.6
Yeah you could just use XIG, but I like being able to do the "delayed screenshot".

And you can use XIG with a 1.6 xbox.

Well, I have XDI, XIG, and lets just say I have XDK, how exactly would I be able to load the Halo 2 maps and use XIG?

xbox7887 · Post by **xbox7887** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 1:29 pm

Snave, it wouldn't be good for recording while you're playing since it does lag a little, which is why I will add a counter to check how often it's executed so it's spaced out just enough not to lag. Then I can compensate for that by slowing down time to reach whatever framerate I wish. This will be only good for animations or small videos flying through levels.

thefreindly0ne · Post by **thefreindly0ne** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 1:34 pm

i dont get what hes saying

xbox7887 · Post by **xbox7887** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 1:44 pm

It is step by step...if you can't figure it out you don't belong here.

thefreindly0ne · Post by **thefreindly0ne** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 2:22 pm

xbox7887 wrote:It is step by step...if you can't figure it out you don't belong here.

no its just i dont have the stuff right in front of me