Carny_Priest

Familiar with AutoHotkey? A quick way that might work would be another script that calls an executable compiled from the capture script. You would use the Loop, Files command to read in files with vpt, fpt, or vpx as extensions. The command can also read in all the file attributes. Run the capture on files on the condition that the date stamp is greater than one you specify as an argument.

I can confirm that OBS 0.651 Beta works for me. I'm still running the script off of a portable drive that has the OBS install. That's how I transfer files over to my cabinet. I don't use OBS for anything else, so I don't need a permanent installation on my cabinet. I found that I have to unplug and plug back in my drive in between FP captures. Otherwise, OBS will only capture audio and not video. So batching up runs is out for me. I only add a few tables at a time anyway. If anyone really needs batch capturing in the script, let me know. I have a workable idea depending on the situation. Otherwise, I think it should still be pretty easy to run a compiled script within another bat file or python script that reads in the contents of a folder that you want processed.

Hi, following up on this thread, http://www.gameex.info/forums/topic/15882-visual-pinball-mini-dmd-screen-3-b2s-for-apron/ , I've added a new feature: a flash viewer that displays instruction and score cards associated with the table. Requires ffmpeg and Adobe flashplayer http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/ https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ As a demo, here's a crappy phone video https://www.dropbox.com/s/nrgpig9azh1b28b/afm.MOV?dl=0 This is a kludgy solution requiring multiple scripts, but it supports swf and png formats (same as PBX) including animated instruction cards. The downside is that all of the instruction card media that is available on the FTP or at VPForums are oriented for viewing on the BG screen which is usually configured for landscape. VP Cabinet tables are rotated in the program to be viewed in portrait but the screen back buffer is still oriented in landscape. This means that the media that I want to display on the apron must also be rotated. Sadly, I found a high percentage of the media could not be directly converted and rotated. So, I could not just simply convert files from the PBX Instruction Cards folder on-the-fly. I had to do screen caps and rotate the resulting images and store them in a folder prior to running the script. I have a batch script that will be included in this post. The output will need to be stored in a separate folder, and secondary score or price cards should be stored in a new folder named "Score Cards". By default I scale the images using the aspect ratio for Stern and latter day Williams/Bally as reference here: http://www.pinballrebel.com/pinball/cards/Card_sizes.htm It is possible to properly scale and display all the rotated images by manufacturer, but that might be a future update. Similar to the previous script, the correct media is displayed based on matching file names to entries in VisualPinball.xml. Matching images for the table are presented in a loop until VP is closed. I've attached a generic Instructions card and a Score card which I display at the beginning of the loop. In my collection, I have an instruction card for every table installed. So, between the generic card and the card associated with the table, I always expect that there will be multiple images to loop. Instruction cards are displayed on the left side of the apron. I don't have score or price cards for most tables, so the generic price card would be all that there is to loop. Rather than loop the same image, I have some code to check the number of files in the loop and if it is just 1 image then the program will not loop. Score cards are displayed on the right side of the apron. The script assumes the playfield aspect ratio is 1920x1080. If your screen is something different then the script must be tweaked to properly scale the images. I have not tested against all tables, but hopefully the images are not covering any play areas. The X,Y coordinates for displaying the images are user configurable. Consider where the instruction and score card images will be displayed, and leave room for the mini-DMD which will be automatically placed below the instruction and score card. The scaling of images is automated based on the the width of DMD defined in the VPM registry or in screenres.txt along with the Filter setting in the User Input section at the top of the script, so that the card images will be lined up directly over the mini-DMD. Card_Width is a failsafe setting in case there happens to be a table installed that does not use VPM and B2S is set to False in the xml. I haven't tested it. I'm not sure I have that situation in my install. The amount of time each images will be displayed before looping to the next is also user configurable at the top of the script. This is definitely for advanced users. This requires a custom xml as explained in the thread for the previous script. I may also be using different VP executables, so the script may require tweaking to fit another install. This is a secondary script for looping instruction cards. It must be compiled and named DisplayCard1.exe This is a secondary script for looping score cards. It must be compiled and named DisplayCard2.exe And here is the ffmpeg batch converter for rotating instruction cards for use in the viewer. You define where the source images are and the script will convert and save the images in %A_ScriptDir%\rotate. arrayc is where you define any animated instruction cards. There are not many at all that I could find. STAT at VPF created the two I put into the array. When the script encounters these files during processing ffmpeg will make a 30 second capture, rotate, and save as an swf file. I originally pursued this solution hoping that the text on the instruction card images would be more legible than what VP tends to render. But I have a standard width table and a 39" screen. It's still a pretty small area, so I don't think it looks much better or clearer than what VP was already doing. But since any sort of video or image content can be displayed, it becomes another creative platform for people to do interesting mods. I hope to see more animated cards or custom backgrounds for the mirrored DMD/B2S: This would be possible with some tweaking to the main script: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/watch-that-dmd#post-1043384 https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/dmd-extender/page/2#post-754826 Cheers!

No need to uninstall. Just install the new version over the old.

Finally got my system back together, and gave fake fullscreen windowed mode a try. Looks good for me outside of BAM. But running with BAM, I just get a blank screen in-game. Doesn't matter if I am downsampling or using really low resolutions. I gotta have BAM, so I'm thinking I am stuck with OBS for capturing.

I generate my own video media using ffmpeg and a script that I have written. http://www.gameex.info/forums/topic/15207-capture-videos-to-pinballx-media-table-backglass-and-dmd/page-3#entry139563 Just to be flashy I prefer videos to static images, and (so far) I have not hit the limits on available storage. That would be the reason why I would use static images over video. The script will capture audio as well, but I use PinballX previews as a kind of screen saver. I generally keep my cab on all the time. I don't want audio and I turn off the option in PinballX settings. The script is meant to capture the table's attract sequence and most tables don't really have much in the way of audio while not in-play. If you must have audio and you don't mind that the audio track is not necessarily synced to anything happening on the table, then you might as well just grab the audio files that are here on this site.

Wrong forum! And just use mame.ini to display on the monitor that corresponds to you bg. It's not a PinballX issue at all.

I don't know. Maybe the OP can delete out all of the grid tags. Should not need them anymore if he is able to launch from the command line. Alternatively, I've ALWAYS had to have an ahk script to launch any Steam programs in my system. Don't know why I have trouble using PBX parameters. So I have PBX launch the script which in turn launches the Steam app. Since the OP needs a script to strip the DMD borders anyway, it would be easy enough to have the script launch PFX2. Can see some of my script examples in the main PFX2 support topic, pre-NukeLauncher.

Sorry, my cab has been down for months. I have not tested the new command line launcher. I use NukeLauncher with a custom ahk. I don't use the built-in PBX launcher, so my experience does not apply. Chances are that if the version running is not Steam, then the command line launch is not supported.

Running PinballX as admin? In VP - Preferences - Keys Overwrite Default Layout is checked?

You should just be able to navigate with left and right flipper. Is your Adobe Flash up to date? I admit that I haven't tested. My cab has been down the last few months.

Nope, but time299 did set up a private server for distributing the media packs. He sent out an email to me yesterday with an individual userid and password. I haven't downloaded the update yet but the previous pack was excellent quality.

I haven't seen a post from open6l in a while. I went ahead and converted the table guides for Castlestorm and Wild West Rampage. They are now on the FTP with the rest of the table guides.

Well, number 1, Pinball FX2 doesn't have any support for real DMD.. Don't know what you intend on doing in-game. If this is truly about having DMD videos in attract mode in Pinball X, maybe someone can give you the specific instructions for converting existing videos. The source that you will want to use is the Nuke Launcher media pack rather than the videos on the FTP. The videos on the FTP have "screen door/banding/interference" artifacts. I'm thinking conversion simply involves converting to greyscale?

Yes, it is command line driven. In PinballX settings you have options for each emulator system you define to define a program to launch before PinballX launches the emulator. Type into the field dc2.exe -config= whatever you named your profile. You will need to enter the path to the dc2 executable. Or you can write a bat that you can call Or you can write a AutoHotkey script Bats or scripts are for if you have more programs that you want to run alongside the emilator

Google display changer I I. Use it to set up different display profiles including rotation and resolutions.

Nice find! I'll have to try it out... whenever I get my cab back up and running. I use a similar strategy for mirroring and streaming the DMD for SlamIt: Big Score. That one requires manually editing an ini file to get windowed full screen and then using AHK to strip out the borders. Didn't think of it for FP. It didn't dawn on me that there was an option to run FP in a window, but it's right there in the config!

Yes. Copy the mame.xml file and give it some other name. PBX will attach "Tables" to the menu description for whatever you name that file (e.g., "MAME Tables" or "Arcade Tables"). I named mine "These are not.xml". Then go inside the original mame.xml and clear out all lines between <menu> and </menu>. Save the file. Now the arcade wheel images should not show on the main wheel. Arcade games will be selectable under the menu. For me, it shows up as "These are not Tables"

For whatever reason, I've never had a problem capturing the BG with gdigrab. It was always capturing opengl renders for the playfield. For captures, I always just ran it the same way that I play it, with fullscreen enabled. It would be a nice to know if there was a method for capturing FP with gdigrab so that OBS would no longer be needed. That would simplify things a lot. And we could better sync the captures and ultimately the playback for each screen. Stripping the windows borders is pretty easy with AHK so it would be a good tradeoff.

Well, I had not gotten around to adding Pinball FX2 yet. Time299's media pack was extremely good as-is. But I am glad that you found a solution. By another way, does that mean that you are using ffmpeg gdigrab to capture FP playfields running in full windowed mode? Or are you still using OBS?

I have not tested that version yet. I have a corrupted boot record and have been too busy with my job to fix it. I've been without a cab for weeks. You might try the previous version of OBS and if you are running Win 7 make sure that the bit of code that turns off Aero is enabled.

Update - there's a bug. The instructions that actually run ffmpeg do not include the path that is assigned at the top of the script. It always worked for me because I have ffmpeg included in my PATH environment. It probably won't work otherwise. Thanks, bpjacobsen. I have an updated script that I now use that operates off of a single VP xml. Unfortunately, it's not the standard PBX setup that uses the new alternateexe tag. I have to do something different to enable my mini DMD mirrors, so it is spinning away from a tool that the more casual PBX user can still use. But if anyone is still interested PM me.

Yes, they are windows. I've updated that last link for TAF.

Hmm, the timings I had worked before for a while, but something has changed. In any case, I set ScreenDelay from 500 to 1000. It still works for me when I decrease MovementDelay from 20 to 10. Getting out of the Football sub-menu worked for me at one time as well, but then it started missing some of the movement instructions and would start another table. I switched ExitMethod from saveexit to savekill. Works for me. I'm glad that NukeLauncher's settings are so flexible!

Update: 1. Using PinballX to exit would often cause VP to throw out memory exception errors. I copied over the CloseVP subroutine from FPLaunch and assigned it as a hotkey to by exit button. Now everything exits cleanly. 2. Sometimes one or the other stream playback windows would activate but would not get moved to the apron. I moved the checkwindow and move subroutine within a loop. Takes a little longer to load the table but the playback windows now appear much more reliably where I instructed. 3. There are some examples of customization added to the script. There are a set of tables, those with secondary playfield displays like Ripley's Believe or Not, Simpson's Pinball Party, and World Poker Tour, where the DMD is squashed a bit because VPinMAME is taking up some of the usual space to render the secondary playfield display. For these I wind up turning on DirectDraw and increasing the height of the display manually to at least make it look less squashed and more like the correct aspect ratio. I allow some overscanning of the image in order to retain an edge-to-edge width on my third monitor. The problem is that because of the overscanning the registry values are out of range for the desktop and causes ffmpeg to crash. For these tables, I just hard-coded the position and dimensions that I want ffmpeg to capture. Again, the script has two streaming algorithms that you can try: 1. The default mpeg4 codec doesn't produce compression artifacts. 2. The xlib264 is faster and may reduce latency and it may be able to successfully stream a larger image where the buffer for the default mpeg4 fills up too fast and causes ffmpeg to crash. Try both and go with which ever one works. Frankenstein has one of the SEGA supersize displays and it is just large enough to crash under the mpeg4 codec but works just fine and without compression artifacts with xlib264. Latest script: Here's some crappy phone videos showing the streaming in action on my P2k style cab - Monster Bash, a DMD: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/45430846/PinXPost20150306/mb.mp4 Funhouse, a B2S: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/45430846/PinXPost20150306/fh.mp4 and The Addams Family, a combination of DMD and B2S (for the THING lights): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/45430846/taf.mp4