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I would like to record some videos of (emulated) SMS games and make them available online. It appears that several people on this forum have done this repeatedly - perhaps someone can guide me through the process:

Thanks

Of course it depends on your OS of choice, as some programs aren't available for all platforms; in general, if you can, it might be a good idea to use a modified emulator directly capable to dump an avi file, such as the ones from TasVideos, so you can follow their Encoding Guide.

Personally, I can't manage to get Dega's avi dumper to work (it's even stated on TasVideos itself that Dega's avi dumper is half broken in Windows), so I use a screen recording software, TechSmith Camtasia Studio, to record the screen (while I use the modified Gens to directly dump Genesis videos, instead). In this case the recommendation is to run the emulator window at a reasonable size, such as 1× or 2× at most, Youtube is filled of videos recorded by idiots who keep their emulators in a maximized window, sometimes even claiming that "it's HD".

Speaking of Youtube, I still think it's the best option out there, even if their new layouts look more and more retarded (and it's going to get worse on march 7th, too). If you ignore the layout, though, Youtube is still good.

To ensure that your uploaded video looks very good, if you have a fast enough connection, you should try to compress it as little as possible before you upload it, since Youtube will transcode it anyway resulting in a loss of quality. A lossless video codec, such as TechSmith's own TSCC for example, is the best option if you can afford to upload hundreds of megabytes of video; likewise, pure wav audio, or very high bitrate mp3/ogg audio ensures the best audio results. I recommend you to use an mkv container for your video, since avi files are bloated and contain a lot of useless overhead; besides, mkv files are much more flexible (you can't use ogg audio in an avi container, just to say one).

That is, if you weren't talking about recording video output from an actual SMS. In that case you'll need specific equipment: look on the Terratec website to know more.

An alternative, albeit not a good one, is to set Meka to 1:1 frameskip, turn on the screen capture every frame and WAV dump features while emulation is halted, and then run like that for a while and post-process to a lossless format later.

The TSCC codec is the most efficient option for lossless encoding, but it's not free. YouTube doesn't support the DOSBox ZMVB codec, which would otherwise be ideal for game video, and certainly not the Kega proprietary codec. So you're forced to use high-bitrate MPEG-4 video which YouTube then re-encodes and the resulting streamed video gets very big.

You can also experiment with scaling before encoding which will affect how YouTube encodes it:

Overall, there is no ideal way to deal with it. However, for this site, we are happy to stick with YouTube, for all the shortcomings, as we can embed it easily and it works "well enough" for most people.

Thanks for the replies. I will look at the uploading process later, but it looks likely that I will use YouTube and, judging by the videos linked by Maxim, 2x scale in order to get the best trade-off in terms of quality vs size.

However, before I can upload, I need to figure out the recording process. It seems that there are two ways to do this:

The quality of video produced by Fusion is not ideal - does anyone know if it is possible to disable scaling?

Quote

Dega's avi dumper is half broken in Windows

Even if this weren't the case, I would rather use an emulator which is more accurate.

Quote

set Meka to 1:1 frameskip, turn on the screen capture every frame and WAV dump features

FRAPS usually gives good results on games.

I'd advise against using complex workaround with MEKA.
I recon it wouldn't be too difficult to add support for some lossless video encoder in MEKA if someone gave it the time.

Resurrecting this topic...

I found BizHawk to do a decent job of dumping audio+video losslessly, however YouTube seems to prefer to re-encode such files at low quality (240p + low bitrate audio). The TASVideos encoding guide seems to confirm my suspicions - to get 60 (or even 50) fps, I need to re-encode my 256x192 video at somewhere near 1080p to get quality out of YouTube (and take a bunch more bandwidth, but I guess nobody cares about that any more).

I did mess with AviSynth many years ago but I have no need for the extra stuff TASVideos does - is there an easy way? I'm hoping for an ffmpeg 1-liner...

Answering my own question:

ffmpeg.exe -i "input.mp4" -vf scale=iw*6:-1:flags=neighbor output.mp4

Scales by x6 (gets you into HD territory) with pixellated scaling. It's pretty slow, sub-realtime on my computer, and the encoding is lossy - it may be possible to speed it up.

Admittedly, I'm a bit of stickler for this sort of thing. However, given the machine itself outputs at a near 16:9 ratio for both PAL and NTSC, I would love to see more video uploaders stretch their uploads accordingly.

Of course, this doesn't work for Codemasters games that actually used the 224/240px tall modes, but for every other Master System game that had the huge vertical borders?
It does make the presentation of the video much nicer!

I did briefly look into pixel aspect ratios, even finding an old discussion of this sort of thing where I'd calculated them - but I came to the conclusion that it would end up looking horribly squashed, plus the huge difference between PAL (1.352) and NTSC (1.141) makes it hard to please everyone. Most games seem to want square pixels, I'd be glad to hear of counterexamples.

Attached is a quick example I made of a Wonder Boy III screen stretched as it would appear on a PAL screen (but with no borders). It's pretty ugly :)

squashed.jpg (21.44 KB)

PAL squashing

squashed-NTSC.jpg (24.12 KB)

NTSC squashing

no-squashing.jpg (26.33 KB)

No squashing

Oh, I never realized how unsquished PAL was! I was always under the assumption that PAL systems were at roughly a 18:9 ratio, and NTSC systems at roughly a 15:9 ratio, and wrote down so in my documents.

Myself, I'd been drawing artwork to a 16:9 anamorphic ratio as a compromise!

I'm actually quite surprised just by how off I appear to be, particularly regarding NTSC. At least my PAL assumptions were close!

I'll have to go digging through some examples at some point. A lot of Mega Drive (32 column mode, of course) and NES games also frequently had art drawn for a Square Pixel ratio, rather than correctly drawing the art for a non-square ratio.
I get the impression a lot of developers didn't really care, understandably. It's a bit of an abstract concept if you're unaware of it, and for smaller artwork, or artwork that isn't geometrically shaped, it doesn't really matter.

This actually caused a bit of a fuss on TASVideos when I was still a staff member there, because some people noted some games weren't drawn to be stretched, despite the machine, but video encoders still had to stretch the videos...

I don't miss those arguments. :)

Author	Message
RetroSpark Joined: 08 Dec 2005 Posts: 488 Location: Melbourne, Australia	Recording Videos of SMS Games Posted: Wed Feb 22, 2012 5:36 am
	I would like to record some videos of (emulated) SMS games and make them available online. It appears that several people on this forum have done this repeatedly - perhaps someone can guide me through the process: 1. Which software do you use for recording? 2. Do you do any processing of the video before uploading? 3. Which video site do you recommend uploading to? Thanks

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	Posted: Wed Feb 22, 2012 9:00 am
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	Of course it depends on your OS of choice, as some programs aren't available for all platforms; in general, if you can, it might be a good idea to use a modified emulator directly capable to dump an avi file, such as the ones from TasVideos, so you can follow their Encoding Guide. Personally, I can't manage to get Dega's avi dumper to work (it's even stated on TasVideos itself that Dega's avi dumper is half broken in Windows), so I use a screen recording software, TechSmith Camtasia Studio, to record the screen (while I use the modified Gens to directly dump Genesis videos, instead). In this case the recommendation is to run the emulator window at a reasonable size, such as 1× or 2× at most, Youtube is filled of videos recorded by idiots who keep their emulators in a maximized window, sometimes even claiming that "it's HD". Speaking of Youtube, I still think it's the best option out there, even if their new layouts look more and more retarded (and it's going to get worse on march 7th, too). If you ignore the layout, though, Youtube is still good. To ensure that your uploaded video looks very good, if you have a fast enough connection, you should try to compress it as little as possible before you upload it, since Youtube will transcode it anyway resulting in a loss of quality. A lossless video codec, such as TechSmith's own TSCC for example, is the best option if you can afford to upload hundreds of megabytes of video; likewise, pure wav audio, or very high bitrate mp3/ogg audio ensures the best audio results. I recommend you to use an mkv container for your video, since avi files are bloated and contain a lot of useless overhead; besides, mkv files are much more flexible (you can't use ogg audio in an avi container, just to say one). That is, if you weren't talking about recording video output from an actual SMS. In that case you'll need specific equipment: look on the Terratec website to know more.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14745 Location: London	Posted: Wed Feb 22, 2012 10:09 am
	An alternative, albeit not a good one, is to set Meka to 1:1 frameskip, turn on the screen capture every frame and WAV dump features while emulation is halted, and then run like that for a while and post-process to a lossless format later. The TSCC codec is the most efficient option for lossless encoding, but it's not free. YouTube doesn't support the DOSBox ZMVB codec, which would otherwise be ideal for game video, and certainly not the Kega proprietary codec. So you're forced to use high-bitrate MPEG-4 video which YouTube then re-encodes and the resulting streamed video gets very big. You can also experiment with scaling before encoding which will affect how YouTube encodes it: Overall, there is no ideal way to deal with it. However, for this site, we are happy to stick with YouTube, for all the shortcomings, as we can embed it easily and it works "well enough" for most people.

RetroSpark Joined: 08 Dec 2005 Posts: 488 Location: Melbourne, Australia	Posted: Fri Feb 24, 2012 1:14 am
	Thanks for the replies. I will look at the uploading process later, but it looks likely that I will use YouTube and, judging by the videos linked by Maxim, 2x scale in order to get the best trade-off in terms of quality vs size. However, before I can upload, I need to figure out the recording process. It seems that there are two ways to do this: 1. Use an emulator capable of outputting a video directly. The available options seem to be (please let me know if you are aware of others): - Kega Fusion The quality of video produced by Fusion is not ideal - does anyone know if it is possible to disable scaling? - Dega Quote Dega's avi dumper is half broken in Windows Even if this weren't the case, I would rather use an emulator which is more accurate. - Meka Quote set Meka to 1:1 frameskip, turn on the screen capture every frame and WAV dump features I did try this, including experimenting with different frameskip settings, but seemed to get more audio data than the number of captured frames would suggest? Also, if the frame rate is anything other than 60Hz, it seems that Meka does not change the PSG clock to correspond. This means that the audio requires a tempo adjustment (rather than a simpler speed adjustment), which seems to introduce distortion. Perhaps this method could be made to work if Meka could output a WAV file not of "what you hear", but of "what you would hear at 60fps" - i.e. output exactly 44100 / 60 = 735 samples per frame? 2. Use screen capture software. I tried using VirtualDub for this but couldn't get it to work. At first it seemed OK but the video was black silence, then I changed some settings and it just hung. Perhaps I'll try a different application.

Bock Site Admin Joined: 08 Jul 2001 Posts: 8651 Location: Paris, France	Posted: Fri Feb 24, 2012 1:50 am
	FRAPS usually gives good results on games. I'd advise against using complex workaround with MEKA. I recon it wouldn't be too difficult to add support for some lossless video encoder in MEKA if someone gave it the time.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14745 Location: London	Posted: Wed Mar 29, 2017 3:20 pm
	Resurrecting this topic... I found BizHawk to do a decent job of dumping audio+video losslessly, however YouTube seems to prefer to re-encode such files at low quality (240p + low bitrate audio). The TASVideos encoding guide seems to confirm my suspicions - to get 60 (or even 50) fps, I need to re-encode my 256x192 video at somewhere near 1080p to get quality out of YouTube (and take a bunch more bandwidth, but I guess nobody cares about that any more). I did mess with AviSynth many years ago but I have no need for the extra stuff TASVideos does - is there an easy way? I'm hoping for an ffmpeg 1-liner...

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14745 Location: London	Posted: Wed Mar 29, 2017 4:03 pm
	Answering my own question: ffmpeg.exe -i "input.mp4" -vf scale=iw*6:-1:flags=neighbor output.mp4 Scales by x6 (gets you into HD territory) with pixellated scaling. It's pretty slow, sub-realtime on my computer, and the encoding is lossy - it may be possible to speed it up.

Flygon Joined: 30 Jun 2016 Posts: 196 Location: Melbourne, Australia	Posted: Thu Mar 30, 2017 2:07 am
	Admittedly, I'm a bit of stickler for this sort of thing. However, given the machine itself outputs at a near 16:9 ratio for both PAL and NTSC, I would love to see more video uploaders stretch their uploads accordingly. Of course, this doesn't work for Codemasters games that actually used the 224/240px tall modes, but for every other Master System game that had the huge vertical borders? It does make the presentation of the video much nicer!

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14745 Location: London	Posted: Thu Mar 30, 2017 1:56 pm
	I did briefly look into pixel aspect ratios, even finding an old discussion of this sort of thing where I'd calculated them - but I came to the conclusion that it would end up looking horribly squashed, plus the huge difference between PAL (1.352) and NTSC (1.141) makes it hard to please everyone. Most games seem to want square pixels, I'd be glad to hear of counterexamples. Attached is a quick example I made of a Wonder Boy III screen stretched as it would appear on a PAL screen (but with no borders). It's pretty ugly :) squashed.jpg (21.44 KB) PAL squashing squashed-NTSC.jpg (24.12 KB) NTSC squashing no-squashing.jpg (26.33 KB) No squashing

Flygon Joined: 30 Jun 2016 Posts: 196 Location: Melbourne, Australia	Posted: Fri Mar 31, 2017 4:41 am
	Oh, I never realized how unsquished PAL was! I was always under the assumption that PAL systems were at roughly a 18:9 ratio, and NTSC systems at roughly a 15:9 ratio, and wrote down so in my documents. Myself, I'd been drawing artwork to a 16:9 anamorphic ratio as a compromise! I'm actually quite surprised just by how off I appear to be, particularly regarding NTSC. At least my PAL assumptions were close! I'll have to go digging through some examples at some point. A lot of Mega Drive (32 column mode, of course) and NES games also frequently had art drawn for a Square Pixel ratio, rather than correctly drawing the art for a non-square ratio. I get the impression a lot of developers didn't really care, understandably. It's a bit of an abstract concept if you're unaware of it, and for smaller artwork, or artwork that isn't geometrically shaped, it doesn't really matter. This actually caused a bit of a fuss on TASVideos when I was still a staff member there, because some people noted some games weren't drawn to be stretched, despite the machine, but video encoders still had to stretch the videos... I don't miss those arguments. :)

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