Capture Videos to PinballX Media - Table, Backglass, and DMD

[Wiesshund]

On 2/24/2020 at 12:23 AM, Carny_Priest said:

I figured these current front-ends had screen recording all taken care of now that it is simply a feature every front-end offers. I wouldn't know. I haven't used a front-end in years.

I've attached the source code that I have. Again, I haven't tested this at all. Likely if 1.5 did not work for you then neither will 1.6. I don't think gtxjoe made any huge changes in how this program functions between those two versions.

PBXrecorder_1.6FP.ahk 87.6 kB · 15 downloads

Unfortunately, how ever Future Pinball renders to the screens
most of the front ends do not seem to be able to capture it, you just get a capture of your desktop of a black screen.

Fraps captures it fine but only the main screen, and OBS of course, on all screens.

I think most of the front ends use FFMpeg, and apparently that does not work so well for FP?

 

[Mike_da_Spike]

5 hours ago, Wiesshund said:

Unfortunately, how ever Future Pinball renders to the screens
most of the front ends do not seem to be able to capture it, you just get a capture of your desktop of a black screen.

Fraps captures it fine but only the main screen, and OBS of course, on all screens.

I think most of the front ends use FFMpeg, and apparently that does not work so well for FP?

 

If you have a NVIDIA video card, you are able to capture the videos via PinballX. See this guide

 

[Wiesshund]

18 hours ago, Mike_da_Spike said:

If you have a NVIDIA video card, you are able to capture the videos via PinballX. See this guide

 

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Also try  PinballX Database manager as an alternative way for gamemanger

That's using carny priest's modification of PBX Recorder, which uses OBS Studio
which captures FP fine with or without the auto hotkey stuff

(Your post shows a different clickable link than what shows when i quote you)
What shows when i quote you, only does the table, which works regardless of nvidia or not, you just have to obviously set AMD up for the AMD driver capture.
But that only does playfield (which i have to convert anyways for pinballX to show them as it does not seem to like to play HEVC video)

I've just been using OBS by itself for FP, which actually isnt bad as i can make captures with sound
and then i dont need to look for sound files

[Mike_da_Spike]

2 hours ago, Wiesshund said:

(Your post shows a different clickable link than what shows when i quote you)
What shows when i quote you, only does the table, which works regardless of nvidia or not, you just have to obviously set AMD up for the AMD driver capture.
But that only does playfield (which i have to convert anyways for pinballX to show them as it does not seem to like to play HEVC video)

 

Hmmm ... NVIDIA capture doesn't use obs and I can capture backglass as well with it.  I don't have an AMD videocard to play with, so not sure. If you have issues with the hevc video capture to play in PBX, did you install the LAV codecs ? 

I use NVEC now to record all videos now. You can download this codec in windows 10 for free from the app store

[Wiesshund]

Yes, i have the LAV codecs, it still has issues, even with it's own videos recorded from game manager sometimes, strangely enough.

I just batch re-encode them for it, and it's happy.
I dont usually have more than a 10 second attract video, so it isnt that big of a deal to batch re-encode them

Thats not FP specific though.

 

PBX does work with OBS though and Fraps (though fraps couldnt see a 2nd or 3rd screen to save itself)
If you lie and say Yes to GPU driver and have one of them standing by.
Works for in game anyways, not so sure that works for the game manager recording function

[Mike_da_Spike]

If you 'lie' about the gpu capture, Gamemanager and Database Manager will try to record it via gpu driver. If the hotkey doesn't create a video, it just fals back on ffmpeg gdigrab.

EDIT: just tried and this is what the log files displayed, If you enable GPU driver capture, but the GPU isn't setup, or doesn't support it
 

07:08:28.06  26-9-2020:  Waiting for playfield capture thread
07:08:34.53  26-9-2020:  Playfield capture driver failure
07:08:34.54  26-9-2020:  FFMPEG.exe -f gdigrab -framerate 30 -offset_x 0 -offset_y 0 -video_size 3440x1440 -t 00:00:20 -i desktop -c:v h264_nvenc -an -preset lossless "c:\users\mike\appdata\local\temp\tmpede6530852222.mp4"
07:08:34.83  26-9-2020:  FFMPEG.exe -f gdigrab -framerate 30 -offset_x 0 -offset_y 0 -video_size 3440x1440 -t 00:00:20 -i desktop -c:v libx264 -crf 0 -preset ultrafast "c:\users\mike\appdata\local\temp\tmpede6530852222.mp4"
07:08:55.44  26-9-2020:  FFMPEG.exe -i "c:\users\mike\appdata\local\temp\tmpede6530852222.mp4" -vf "vflip,hflip" -c:v h264_nvenc -an -rc vbr_hq -cq:v 31 -b:v 0 -pix_fmt yuv420p -f mp4 -movflags +faststart "C:\Pinball\PinballX\MEDIA\Visual Pinball\Table Videos\250cc (Inder - 1992) (2).mp4"
07:08:56.06  26-9-2020:  FFMPEG.exe -i "c:\users\mike\appdata\local\temp\tmpede6530852222.mp4" -vf "vflip,hflip" -c:v libx264 -an -crf 21 -pix_fmt yuv420p -f mp4 -movflags +faststart -c:v libx264 -an -crf 21 -pix_fmt yuv420p -f mp4 "C:\Pinball\PinballX\MEDIA\Visual Pinball\Table Videos\250cc (Inder - 1992) (2).mp4"
07:09:36.48  26-9-2020:  Playfield capture success

 

[Wiesshund]

Did you have something set up that was listening for the hotkey?

Like fraps for example?

[Carny_Priest]

Hi, I have coded an AutoHotkey script to capture video for playfield, backglass, and fullDMD screens for PinballY.

Why? 

I am capturing all three screens simultaneously, so it is a lot quicker than Pinball Y's built-in screen recorder. And it is cool to have the DMD display synchronous with action on the playfield. I built it for attract mode, but it could be adapted for gameplay capture on a cabinet. Last time I checked PinballX capture screens in sequence.

It is OBS-Studio based. It will capture Future Pinball as well as Visual Pinball. It can be adapted to work with any games that players run on a cabinet. PinballY's GDI-based capture does not support Future Pinball. I've tried NVidia Experience based screen capturing with Future Pinball with weird results, an interpolation of playfield and backglass screen captures in a single stream.

It takes advantage of GPU-based encoding and hardware acceleration to perform near real-time single pass captures even on my modest hardware configuration - better quality output, done faster, and with smaller file sizes.

It's the latest step in the automated media capture work that I started back in 2014. See OP.

PinballY's database is similar to PinballX. The behavior is a bit different in that PinballY matches to media solely based on the description tag so there are no invalid Windows characters allowed. PinballX last time I checked can match to media on either the description tag or the game name tag. I think getting the script working with PinballX would be a matter of adding some more error handling.

Check it out! Includes instructions. Attached.

 

CapScreensOBS.zip

Edited December 24, 2023 by Carny_Priest
Add disclaimer to the instructions

[Carny_Priest]

I can confirm that the script works with the current OBS Studio v30.0.2 and the current stable release of ffmpeg v6.1.1.

 

It's the way I capture media, so I will keep checking it against current toolsets every few months.