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

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Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

Hoo boy, there is a lot to untangle here.

First off, the reason your AVI corrupts is probably because it grows over 4 GB. AVI is an *old* format that was not designed for files that large, and as such uses 32 bit data fields for storing data locations, which can only point in a 4 GB range. There are some extensions to the AVI format that allow it to be bigger, but your tool of choice seemingly does not support or use them.

Second, Lagarith is a lossless codec, there is nothing you can do about that. You can't make it store 'less' data, it will just store all the data. As such the 'bitrate' can fluctuate *wildly* between different types of input, it's unlikely to be related to your PC. If you're lucky you can maybe set the compression type or parameters, but it's unlikely to make a large enough difference.

With those options out of the way, you probably do indeed need to use another codec. While I don't recommend it for general use, because AVI in theory does not support it, you may be able to use x264vfw to encode x264 into an AVI container. Again, this is technically not supported, but tends to usually work out in practice anyway if you don't use fancy features like variable framerates. Give it a shot.

Oh, and are MP4 and AVI your only export container options?

# ¿ Sep 27, 2018 21:43

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 18:14

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

Nah that means something like resolution or colorspace or whatever doesn't match, AviSynth doesn't like giving useful error messages for that stuff unfortunately. Try something like video ++ showscore().ConvertToYV12() maybe?

Is there still nothing better than AviSynth for scripting videos, by the way? What happened to VapourSynth? AviSynth cute and all but it has so many bad design decisions that make it extremely difficult to write sane code in...

# ¿ Oct 11, 2018 10:00

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

Shouldn't matter, the fpsnum/fpsden parameters force the framerate to be exactly what you set by duplicating and/or dropping frames as necessary, preserving video length and relative positions of frames. In theory anyway.

Can you try extracting the audio clip manually via ffmpeg ("ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -vn -c:a copy out.m4a" or similar) and check if that matches your video length?

# ¿ Feb 14, 2019 00:50

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

A bitrate of 2500 for 2560x1440 at 60FPS is absurdly low, *especially* for a real-time encode of a fast-moving game like Sonic Generations. You want at least ten times that, and maybe drop the resolution to 1080p.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2019 22:58

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

Without knowing more specifics: Make sure you're using the software renderer, not the OpenGL one.

If that doesn't work try another emulator. melonDS is getting pretty good these days.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2019 20:34

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

melonDS uses raw save files and Desmume uses raw save files with a custom footer, that shouldn't be a problem. Try the following:

- Make a regular in-game save (not savestate) in Desmume and close the emulator.
- In the 'Battery' subfolder of Desmume find the *.dsv file with the same name as your ROM.
- Copy it into the same folder as your ROM and change the extension from .dsv to .sav.
- Open the now-.sav file in a Hex Editor (eg. HxD) and remove the last handful of bytes to create a file with a filesize of a power of 2 -- where it says 'Snip above here to create a raw sav by excluding this DeSmuME savedata footer'. For Last
Window the resulting file should now be exactly 0x40000 or 262144 bytes.

- Open the ROM in melonDS. It should automatically find and load the save.

Admiral H. Curtiss fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Aug 25, 2019

# ¿ Aug 25, 2019 15:26

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

To get it back into Desmume open the game in Desmume and then go to File -> Import Backup Memory and select the save to import.

e: I just noticed there's also an Export option there that probably just auto-strips that footer, haha. Either way, it works.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2019 18:14

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

Youtube does arbitrary aspect ratios on videos just fine. It will pillar/letterbox the video to 16:9 in the default player, though. But the source video AR is preserved so if you, say, fullscreen on a 4:3 display on a 4:3 video you get no boxing.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2019 09:24

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

With that kinda image I'd try a palleted PNG (256 colors) before JPG, myself.

# ¿ Jan 14, 2020 02:04

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

Yeah, that's what AudioDub() does. You need MixAudio() to mix.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2020 17:50

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

Just use OBS with the default settings? Is there any specific part you're having trouble with there?

# ¿ Oct 24, 2020 13:07

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

If you do Discord screenshare that's exactly the correct thing though. Discord only transmits game audio through the screenshare, you all hear eachother through Discord, OBS picks up the both the game and the other people through the local PC's audio output and your voice through the mic... seems all correct to me.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2020 21:00

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

lol that's Higurashi, hope you realize how long that is.

But yeah parsing that into something usable should be fairly simple with even just a little programming/scripting.

e: In fact I think this literally compiles as C if you provide actual implementations for the functions. Easy.

Admiral H. Curtiss fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Jan 13, 2021

# ¿ Jan 13, 2021 01:58

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

Okay it's not actually C, but close enough.

https://github.com/AdmiralCurtiss/HigurashiLP
https://pastebin.com/raw/BqAjqrza

This can be easily extended, too -- y'know, autogenerating stuff like audio links and partial portraits, though the latter is probably a bit more complicated with this game because the lines aren't actually assigned to characters.

Admiral H. Curtiss fucked around with this message at 04:03 on Jan 13, 2021

# ¿ Jan 13, 2021 02:41

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

That sounds like a high keyframe interval on your videos to me. ("-g <integer framecount>" in ffmpeg) What's your encoding settings?

Admiral H. Curtiss fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Mar 2, 2021

# ¿ Mar 2, 2021 16:28

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

You can try several upscaling algorithms but at some point you just kinda have to accept that the source is low-res so it'll look some kind of bad on modern displays either way.

What I generally like to do for pixel-y stuff is to do a two-step upscale, first a integer nearest neighbor scaling close to the target resolution, and then a bilinear scaling to actually get there, but that probably doesn't help much with an anime-style FMV.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2021 17:06

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

You could try encoding on your GPU instead if the CPU is the bottleneck -- over in OBS on an NVIDIA card that's under Output -> Recording -> Encoder -> NVIDIA NVENC. Likely similar on an AMD card. The Quality/Size ratio tends to be a bit worse with GPU encoding, but since you're likely editing and reencoding afterwards anyway that shouldn't be a big deal.

If nothing else uses the HDD you're recording to that's fine, but if eg. you also have the game you're running stored on there that *might* cause loading stutters on either the video or the game, so you'd want to split them up to different drives.

# ¿ Aug 9, 2021 15:16

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

Simply Simon posted:

Excellent advice, I was hoping for secret tips like this. Unfortunately, as it turns out, the setting was already on NVENC :/.

Did you try the other way around then, encoding on the CPU?

Alternatively you could try something like Shadowplay or Windows 10's built-in game recording thing (Windows key + G), that may or may not work better. And there's always old-school options like Fraps if you *really* want performance at the expense of video filesize, I suppose.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2021 22:22

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

Yeah, that Shadowplay recording seems perfect. There's some slight audio desync going on in both videos but that's easy to fix in post -- also that may just be the emulator itself, now that I think about it. No clue how Windows manages to not record the voices but oh well.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2021 21:40

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

If the official app is causing issues, I can recommend this open-source reimplementation which allows you to use any XInput controller or even Keyboard. I've been using this for a while on my PS4 (technically just to use a different controller, not for the actual remote playing part) and it works quite well -- though I admit I had to hack together comfortable support for the touch pad button...

Admiral H. Curtiss fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Sep 29, 2021

# ¿ Sep 29, 2021 19:51

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

Solitair posted:

I'll give this a shot, too, once I figure out how to use the website.

Haha yeah it's an, uh, questionable UI at best. Here's a direct link to the latest Windows build: https://git.sr.ht/~thestr4ng3r/chiaki/refs/download/v2.1.1/Chiaki-v2.1.1-Windows-x86_64.zip

# ¿ Sep 30, 2021 05:55

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

As far as I remember it should just work. Do the keyboard controls in Chiaki work?

Try if your controller if recognized by something else, like Dolphin or Steam.

e: Oh wait, DS4 controllers don't expose XInput by default, do they? You might need to add DS4Windows or something into that chain to use it on Chiaki.

Admiral H. Curtiss fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Oct 2, 2021

# ¿ Oct 2, 2021 02:44

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

Xbox 360 games (and most other semi-modern console games, for that matter) do actually run at 59.94 FPS (60000/1001 to be exact) so Shadowplay might be correct about that one. Not like you'll ever notice the difference between the two in practice.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2021 01:05

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

Yeah pretty much. For GBA I would recommend mGBA these days.

To avoid desyncs between the game recording and your voice recording you should use an external recording software like OBS or whatever. An emulator's built-in recording feature will render out at the 'real' game speed, ignoring things like emulator slowdown or turboing, which is not ideal for real time commentary.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2021 15:16

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

For the record, the little square in the Properties on Windows means 'keep unchanged from what it was'. When it's enabled it's a checkmark, when it's disabled it's clear.

Anyway, mGBA writes its saves right next to the ROM itself by default, in the same folder -- not the mGBA executable directory or the mGBA config directory in AppData. So make sure that is writable. You can also set your own global one in the settings instead (Tools -> Settings... -> Paths).

If that still doesn't work, uh, good question. You could try using Process Monitor to see why it's getting denied, I guess?

# ¿ Oct 24, 2021 02:02

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

If you remux with ffmpeg instead of Elgato's whatever, does that fix it?

code:

ffmpeg -i input.ts -codec copy -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc output.mp4

Alternatively, what's stopping you from just using the correctly synced ts file?

# ¿ Sep 20, 2022 20:09

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

If you're taking screenshots from a video make sure your video is actually lossless and not chroma subsampled.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2023 16:10

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

Odd Wilson posted:

PNG at default compression level is fine as it won't disturb the image at all if it was clean to begin with- changing it makes it worse in my experience.

PNG compression is lossless, so even if you change the parameters it it won't affect the output; think of it like a .zip or .7z, you can also adjust compression levels there but you still get a bitexact file back after decompression. Though there are some PNG compressor programs that do things such as pallette reduction before compression, which does reduce filesize but is obviously not lossless anymore.

# ¿ May 9, 2023 17:37

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 18:14

Admiral H. Curtiss: May 11, 2010; I think there are a bunch of people who can create trailing images. I know some who could do this as if they were just going out for a stroll.

The error you made is using Rightload in 2023, that program hasn't been updated in over a decade. Use ShareX instead.

https://lpix.org/sharex

# ¿ Nov 3, 2023 16:29

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

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