#playclaw

[sparrow-va]

Okay, so does anyone have any experience with Playclaw and/or recording Garry's Mod?

I've been trying to get footage of Prop Hunt with some friends and it is just...not happening.  90% of the time the recording just stops working a few seconds in.  When I stop it, the video file is corrupted.  And when I try starting the recording again, it crashes the game.

There was one time by some fluke that I managed to get about 26 minutes of footage.  Then the map switched over and the loading screen came up and...it stopped recording.  Corrupted file.

A friend of mine, however, was recording simultaneously for a good two hours or so with no issues.  Does anyone have any ideas or solutions for this?  We're trying to make Youtube videos and it'd be a lot better if we could switch perspectives every so often.  Not possible currently.  =|

[monkeywithocd-blog]

Mistakes have been made

So, I decided this morning that I was going to record some more footage for my Minecraft Alpha Let's Play, and I was having fun so I continued to play for two hours. After that, I decided to drop the files into Sony Vegas, and to my dismay I saw that PlayClaw, the program I typically use to record my games didn't record my voice. Now, a few days ago the USB port I had my microphone plugged into broke. Somehow my headset fell on the USB cord causing the port to become malformed. The port below it I was able to salvage, though, so I just plugged it into that.

The problem is that for some reason, my computer thinks my microphone is a new device whenever I plug it into different ports, and I didn't think to change PlayClaws settings. I assumed that it would still recognize my microphone. In a perfect world, it would, and unfortunately I don't think I have anyone to blame but myself.

Not all is lost, though. I'm deciding to still use the footage, just speed it up a lot and set it to music, but its not much of a video. I guess the real upside is that I didn't do a whole lot in the video, only at the end did I really start a project, and I was mostly just stumbling around trying to tell stories of the last few days. Still, to have to pretty much scrap two hours of footage is incredibly annoying.

[realrandomsam]

LP Update 2.0

Well. It seems as though Fraps doesn't like older games. It loudly protested me trying to play Danger by Design.

So, any older games that I had planned to play are now on hold. However, I will continue on with Smite, Amnesia, and the new game which will be revealed whenever my editing program and YouTube decide to cooperate.

And then, once December rolls around and I make some extra cash, I'll get new recording software. (I hear that Playclaw is quite good with older games, so I'm exploring that one.)

Thank you for your understanding. Cheers!

[dunwalllooksamazing-blog]

Dishonored with SweetFx recorded with PlayClaw.

The Soundtrack is from the Capsized OST.

[mistermanny]

FFmpeg cheat sheet

In case anyone ever needs something similar, I'd like to share my FFmpeg cheat sheet (for newer versions of FFmpeg; i.e. v1.0 or newer. I am using v1.1).

I am mainly working with 1080p material at 30 frames per seconds that I captured with Playclaw.

Youtube (1080p HD): ffmpeg -i <source.avi> -c:v libx264 -c:a aac -strict 2 -preset slower -crf 18 -tune film <output_for_youtube.mkv>

Notes: Usually works well enough. I vary the CRF setting (+-2.5) depending on the complexity of the source material to avoid exploding bitrates. 18-20 is a good range to start with though.

There used to be weird stuff happening to videos for some time that seems to have something to do with B-frames, but that seems to be gone now. Otherwise the flag -b-pyramid none usually did the trick back then.

For my Nexus 7 (720p HD): ffmpeg -i <source.avi> -c:v libx264 -c:a aac -strict 2 -preset slower -crf 24 -tune film,fastdecode -ac 1 -b:a 80k -vf fps=fps=25,scale=-1:720 <output_for_nexus7.mkv>

Notes: Not wildly different from my youtube version except that I use a higher CRF for smaller file sizes (usually 24 is not too noticable horrid), and use FFmpeg's video filters to decrease the resolution and frames per seconds. Also, mono sound, since the Nexus 7 only has one speaker; and the fastdecode tuning setting.

Just make thumbnails: ffmpeg -i <source.avi> -f image2 -an -vf fps=fps=1/10,scale=w=iw/2:h=ih/2 thumb%4d.jpg

Notes: Makes thumbnails every 10 seconds at half the resolution of the video.