PinballX not recording videos correctly

[DBrown67]

I've been at this hours over a few days now, Here's a timeline of what I've done/tried and where I am now....

I recently updated my PinballX to the latest 5.01. I was having issues recording DMD images while using a PupPack overlay, which I've temporarily put on the back burner by just using a black screen for DMD as a "no DMD" file in PinballX.

So I decided to try recording playfield videos. And here's where the frustration REALLY kicks in. I downloaded and installed the recommended codecs, but left them exactly as they were, I changed nothing from default. Then I downloaded the latest 1.6 version of PBX recorder. I decided to just record playfield only to start with. But PBX recorder just records a video (correctly positioned and decent quality) at a very slow fps rate. Far too slow to be of use.

So I decided to use the recording function within Game Manager for a single table. This again resulted in a far too slow video for the playfield. 

Then I decided to look at the LAV codec settings. There are a plethora of settings in there, and I have no idea what they do. The only thing I noticed was hardware acceleration was set to "none", which didn't look right to me. So I set it to Nvidia as I have a GTX1070 in my cab.

Tried to record a playfield video... and this time it was too fast! Like it was running 5x the speed of the table. At least I was getting somewhere... or so I thought. 

I have vsync on when in VPX, perhaps it's not on when recorder is working? Vsync was indeed turned off in Nvidia controller, so I set that to on and tried again. Now Game Manager refuses to record anything from the playfield.  Even if I choose "overwrite existing" the tables video folder remains empty. It will still record DMD and backglass videos, just not table videos any more.

I checked the playfield file location in PinballX settings and it is correct. I know it's correct because going back to PBX recorder DOES put a new video in that folder... but at like 4 fps as before. So why has Game Manager suddenly decided to stop recording any playfield videos?

The only thing I did notice that looks odd is that my DMD monitor seems to be running at 30 fps. I noticed this because I had Fraps in the background at one point, and the fps counter switched from playfield to DMD monitor and I saw it changed from 60 to 30. But all monitors are running at 60 Hz according to Windows settings.. I don't know if this has any influence on playfield recording though. (I understand using GPU acceleration only works for playfield).

Another anomaly is that when I tried to record a few videos of all three monitors using Game Manager, it would record the DMD only for the Stern table "24" stretching the DMD top bottom and not recording the PupPack overlay. But when it came to table "AC/DC" it DID record the DMD screen correctly, including overlay. 

My Screenres.txt is fine as the positioning of the videos (when created) is OK.

I'd be happy to just get some playfield videos recorded for now. I can leave the back glass and DMDs for later. One step at a time....

[Mike_da_Spike]

Maybe stupid question, but why you use pbx recorder, instead of pinballX recorder ?

And I thought that Pinballx indeex records the videos as 30 fps in 4k. But because you have an nvidia card you can record ot in 60hz 4k with the nvidia hardware capture.

I use nvidia capture with PinballX recorder as (via database manager). I record only playfield and backglass

[scutters]

19 hours ago, Mike_da_Spike said:

Maybe stupid question, but why you use pbx recorder, instead of pinballX recorder ?

Not stupid Mike. It was my suggestion to try it to try and get round the dmd image capture issue (another thread). 

@DBrown67 Can you attach your pinballx log and ini files after recording a playfield video via PinballX , and if the file is small enough attach the video too (if one is created!).  Would be interesting to see the log for the acdc/24 dmd recording too. Think it'll need Tom to work out what's happening but they should help.

I do think think the general recommendation is not to have hardware acceleration enabled in LAV settings though. Screenshot lav settings and attach them too!.   Also, please confirm if you have hardgrab.exe in the pinballx folder or if you removed it in earlier troubleshooting.