Tech Support Fort - Questions, Comments and Codecs (READ THE OP!)

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Tech Support Fort - Questions, Comments and Codecs (READ THE OP!)

DoubleNegative: Jan 27, 2010; The most virtuous child in the entire world.

Kangra posted:

How easy/difficult is installing or using a virtual machine? I can dual boot to XP or Windows 8.1.

Setting up virtual machines is pretty simple. Just download Oracle VM VirtualBox and pop in a windows CD or mount a windows CD image. I'm pretty sure you can get a free image of XP from Microsoft. Or you used to be able to.

Then just go through the steps on-screen to create the virtual machine, and point it at the appropriate CD/DVD drive. Once it's installed, you can clone the VM to have a backup in case something goes horribly, horribly wrong with it.

You can also poke around Microsoft's site for their own virtual machine software and give that a try.

# ¿ Feb 2, 2014 12:00

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 15:06

DoubleNegative: Jan 27, 2010; The most virtuous child in the entire world.

Mortimer posted:

How does one stream/live commentary with another person over the internet? If you try something like hitbox the delay isn't too horrible, but the person in say, a skype call with you can't have the stream's audio on, otherwise they hear you through both the stream and through skype. Is the only way to have the co-commentator mute their skype and listen to everything through the stream? Or is there another way I'm not thinking of?

With some Virtual Audio Cable shenanigans, in theory you should be able to route stream audio to the skype call. The way I've figured it should work is you...

Set up two virtual cables: Line 1 and Line 2. Make Line 1 the system playback default. You're also going to want three VAC repeaters that you set up like so:

Line 1 -> Speakers

Line 1 -> Line 2

Microphone -> Line 2

Finally set Skype's input to be Line 2.

That should route all system audio into the skype call and then broadcast it out to the stream as well. After you finish the stream, don't forget to set system default playback back to what it was before, usually speakers. Otherwise you will not be able to hear any audio!

DoubleNegative fucked around with this message at 07:22 on Feb 3, 2014

# ¿ Feb 3, 2014 07:08

DoubleNegative: Jan 27, 2010; The most virtuous child in the entire world.

I'm encountering a strange problem with MeGUI. I'm not sure what's going on with the program, but it seems to be encoding my videos all the same, despite the bitrate I assign.

To test my theory I encoded four 17 second videos at different bitrates (1500, 3000, 20CRF, 24CRF) and all four came out functionally identical to each other.

1500kbps

3000kbps

CRF20

CRF24

Source video

If there's any differences between the images, they're so minute as to not make any functional difference.

Is there some reason why all the encodes came out looking exactly identical to each other?

EDIT: For the sake of hilarity, I tried another encode at 750kbps. Three guesses how it turned out

DoubleNegative fucked around with this message at 05:51 on May 9, 2014

# ¿ May 9, 2014 05:33

DoubleNegative: Jan 27, 2010; The most virtuous child in the entire world.

Admiral H. Curtiss posted:

Well, first off, that's a very bad example shot. You're not gonna see differences on a static, mostly black menu screen. You want something with lots of movement.

That said, there's a couple different ways to get a video out of MeGui, which steps are you using exactly? If you use the AutoEncode and don't use the "Use Profile Settings" option then yeah, it'll ignore your encoding settings.

Here's two fresh examples! 750kbps and 3000kbps. Also for whatever reason youtube doesn't seem to want to give the 750 one its 720p resolution. The source looks better, just grainer in motion.

With all the motion in the videos I can definitely see the difference. I was just looking in the wrong places for those differences before! Thanks!

As for the steps I'm taking to get the video, what I do is get all my video quality settings in order, and then hit the queue button. Same for the audio. Then when I'm ready I just go over to the queue and hit start on the whole list.

# ¿ May 9, 2014 17:57

DoubleNegative: Jan 27, 2010; The most virtuous child in the entire world.

I'm utterly at my wit's end here. I'm working on the final video for my LP and wanted to do a stupid joke where I cut to a couple clips from Clue the Movie between the different endings.

The clips that I grabbed off youtube (because I don't have the DVD) are 480x360, recorded in 44,100Hz, and 29.97 FPS. My video is 1280x720, 48,000Hz, and 30 FPS.

code:

m1 = AVISource("E:\Recordings\mars-pc 2015-07-10 16-26-14-538.avi").ConverttoYV12()
clue1 = DirectShowSource("E:\Video\Youtube\Clue Alternate Ending Segue.mp4").Lanczos4Resize(960, 720).AddBorders(160, 0, 160, 0).ConverttoYV12().ChangeFPS(30).SSRC(48000).MergeChannels()
clue2 = DirectShowSource("E:\Video\Youtube\Clue Alternate Ending Segue 2.mp4").Lanczos4Resize(960, 720).AddBorders(160, 0, 160, 0).ConverttoYV12().ChangeFPS(30).SSRC(48000).MergeChannels()


t1 = Trim(m1, 191751, 196791) #intro
ff1 = ChangeSpeed(Trim(m1, 196791, 202649), 2) #enrichment for the last time
t2 = Trim(m1, 202649, 220750) #ending 1
t3 = Trim(m1, 220949, 227365) #ending 2
t4 = Trim(m1, 227476, 0) #The end!

video = (t1 ++ ff1 ++ t2 ++ clue1 ++ t3 ++ clue2 ++ t4)

return video

This is what I eventually wound up with, which is all well and good, except that it causes Avisynth to spew out an error I've never seen before, and I'm pretty certain nobody else has either.

"Evaluate: Operands of `++' must be clips
(New file, Line 12)"

Changing all the ++ to + causes it to similarly complain about those.

Am I just completely overlooking something simple in my effort to make a lovely joke?

# ¿ Jul 13, 2015 07:43

DoubleNegative: Jan 27, 2010; The most virtuous child in the entire world.

nielsm posted:

Can't see anything wrong by reading, but try writing it like this instead:
code:
video = t1
video = video ++ ff1
video = video ++ t2
video = video ++ clue1
video = video ++ t3
video = video ++ clue2
video = video ++ t4
return video
That should have it tell you more precisely where things go wrong.

The error is occurring at the "video = video ++ clue1" line. I wonder why the interpreter isn't reading clue1 and clue2 as clips :psyduck:

# ¿ Jul 13, 2015 07:58

DoubleNegative: Jan 27, 2010; The most virtuous child in the entire world.

Suspicious Dish posted:

What happens if you put "return clue1" right below the line that says "clue1 =" ?

The preview window says "Not a clip".

# ¿ Jul 13, 2015 08:06

DoubleNegative: Jan 27, 2010; The most virtuous child in the entire world.

nielsm posted:

Actually, try removing MergeChannels, I don't think it what you want.

If you have a mono/stereo mismatch, fix that in a different way.

Alright, I fixed the issue completely.

Here's how it worked:

Despite having read over the OP, I missed the part where it said to not use DirectShowSource. That was the cause of all of my problems with the video. What I did instead was use FFAudioSource and FFVideoSource, then AudioDubbed the two together.

code:

m1 = AVISource("E:\Recordings\mars-pc 2015-07-10 16-26-14-538.avi").ConverttoYV12()

ca1 = FFAudioSource("E:\Video\Youtube\Clue Alternate Ending Segue.mp4")
cv1 = FFVideoSource("E:\Video\Youtube\Clue Alternate Ending Segue.mp4")
clue1 = AudioDUb(cv1, ca1).Lanczos4Resize(960, 720).AddBorders(160, 0, 160, 0).ConverttoYV12().ChangeFPS(30).SSRC(48000)
ca2 = FFAudioSource("E:\Video\Youtube\Clue Alternate Ending Segue 2.mp4")
cv2 = FFVideoSource("E:\Video\Youtube\Clue Alternate Ending Segue 2.mp4")
clue2 = AudioDub(cv2, ca2).Lanczos4Resize(960, 720).AddBorders(160, 0, 160, 0).ConverttoYV12().ChangeFPS(30).SSRC(48000)


t1 = Trim(m1, 191751, 196791) #intro
ff1 = ChangeSpeed(Trim(m1, 196791, 202649), 2) #enrichment for the last time
t2 = Trim(m1, 202649, 220750) #ending 1
t3 = Trim(m1, 220949, 227365) #ending 2
t4 = FadeOut(Trim(m1, 227476, 238035), 30) #The end!

video = (t1 ++ ff1 ++ t2 ++ clue1 ++ t3 ++ clue2 ++ t4)

return video

Thanks you two!

# ¿ Jul 13, 2015 09:03

DoubleNegative: Jan 27, 2010; The most virtuous child in the entire world.

Has anyone else had a problem with Microsoft Security Essentials deciding that AVSPMod is infected by malware? It started happening to me last week, and I thought I had fixed the problem by whitelisting the executable and the program directory. The problem, however, has now resurfaced.

I'd really rather not have to turn off virus protection every time I have to update my thread.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2015 15:41

DoubleNegative: Jan 27, 2010; The most virtuous child in the entire world.

Geemer posted:

Works fine on my computer with Windows 7 MSE and the latest definitions. Did you maybe (re)download AvsPmod from some place that added stuff in?

Have you tried re-downloading from GitHub?

Nothing should have changed. It's the same "install" that I've had for the past four years.

For some reason MSE wiped out the whitelist entries, so I re-added AVSP and it seems to be working for now.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2015 16:36

DoubleNegative: Jan 27, 2010; The most virtuous child in the entire world.

Is there some sort of best practices for recording from an n64 emulator? I'm running into all sorts of problems with graphics plugins.

Text is often unreadable.

The dimensions of the screenshot are 320x262, which means that the plugin is adding 22 pixels of dead space to the image for reasons I can't even begin to remotely fathom.

And even when I swap to a plugin that doesn't do that, there's still a frankly embarrassing amount of space that's not rendered. 48 pixels of black space on the X axis, and 80 pixels of blank space on the Y axis.

If I use irfanview to cut the borders out, I'm left with a 592x400 image instead of a nice 640x480 image.

Lastly if I use a plugin that enables overscan, it comes with its own issues. And there's those 22 pixels of dead space on the image again.

So is there anything I can do or change, or am I going to have to live with a whole lot of useless black space on every image?

# ¿ Oct 2, 2015 05:55

DoubleNegative: Jan 27, 2010; The most virtuous child in the entire world.

Suspicious Dish posted:

Play Paper Mario in Dolphin on VC. The best N64 emulator we have.

I'm pretty sure this is gonna be what I wind up doing. Thanks everyone!

# ¿ Oct 2, 2015 08:07

DoubleNegative: Jan 27, 2010; The most virtuous child in the entire world.

Can anyone recommend a good set of headphones that are comfortable to wear with glasses? I have a(n admittedly lovely) desktop mic, so I don't need a headset.

Just something that lets me hear audio and doesn't sound like a tin can, please.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2016 22:21

DoubleNegative: Jan 27, 2010; The most virtuous child in the entire world.

nielsm posted:

My experience is that you will want either in-ear ones, which can give earwax problems, or fully cupped ones with extra soft foam rings. I use Sennheiser HD 380 Pro, they remain comfortable after 2 hours and possibly more. They also have decent passive noise blocking.

I just looked up the Sennheiser HD 380 on Amazon, and $150 is a bit out of my price range at the moment, and in-ear ones are definitely out of the question as they start hurting after about two seconds.

However I did find these, which seem to be fairly nice as well and for a much more reasonable price: https://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-HD-429-Headphones-Black/dp/B005N8W1Q0/

Thanks!

DoubleNegative fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Jun 27, 2016

# ¿ Jun 27, 2016 23:29

DoubleNegative: Jan 27, 2010; The most virtuous child in the entire world.

MeGUI has up and decided that it doesn't like the built-in function TimeStretch. Any script using it that I throw at the renderer fails outright.

The above error is in the context of Nidoking's ChangeSpeed function. MeGUI is the only program that has a problem with the function. VirtualDub, Aegisub, even AVSPmod are all fine with the script as it stands. Any ideas why it's suddenly acting up?

# ¿ Aug 13, 2018 20:47

DoubleNegative: Jan 27, 2010; The most virtuous child in the entire world.

discworld is all I read posted:

Ran into a similar issue a while ago and Nido had some helpful advice that you might want to check:
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3590713&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=138#post479789788

Thank you! That seems to have fixed things.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2018 21:34

DoubleNegative: Jan 27, 2010; The most virtuous child in the entire world.

Warning everyone now: do not allow ShareX to update to 13.0.1. It completely broke the program for me.

I can no longer drag and drop all my files onto the program window to upload. Even better, it only saves the last 10 images uploaded. It doesn't even display them as a list, it displays them as large icon image previews. So unless there's a hidden "unfuck the program" setting I'm not seeing, the new version has become all but useless for LPs in an efficient fashion.

EDIT: It still displays all the last uploads, but it's forcing that awful "large icon image previews" feature, and you have to dig into a menu to disable it. Also you have to actually go Upload -> From File -> Select Images. So it's still pretty bad.

DoubleNegative fucked around with this message at 03:54 on Aug 29, 2019

# ¿ Aug 29, 2019 03:51

DoubleNegative: Jan 27, 2010; The most virtuous child in the entire world.

Turn off simultaneous uploads in ShareX.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2023 21:41

DoubleNegative: Jan 27, 2010; The most virtuous child in the entire world.

Hardware encoding is like magic and should be used if you have the option. Using Resolves UI to make a bunch of edits that would be nightmares in Avisynth is also like magic. It's really intuitive, and the few things that aren't are a quick google away. Also, Resolve supports hardware encoding, so just use that and be done with edits and encoding in less than an hour! Just remember to tell Resolve to encode with h265 because apparently that supports gpu encoding while h264 evidently costs money and so does not let you use your gpu. :shrug:

My last Links Awakening video was 35 minutes or so, and the final encode in its 1080/60 glory took like 22 minutes total. The part of all this that took the longest was youtubes hour-and-a-half processing.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2023 06:46

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 15:06

DoubleNegative: Jan 27, 2010; The most virtuous child in the entire world.

Resolve is now trash and can burn in hell.

In all seriousness though, CPU encoding is good enough with a powerful enough system. It's definitely not worth $300 to get hardware encoding in Resolve. And the other professional-grade alternatives are either paying a monthly fee to Adobe or trusting the people behind Vegas Pro.

Don't trust Vegas Pro. That poo poo stops working for any number of reasons like "it's a day that ends in Y."

# ¿ Sep 28, 2023 09:58

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Tech Support Fort - Questions, Comments and Codecs (READ THE OP!)