Video Recording - playfield, backglass, DMD - quick questions

[Carny_Priest]

It's not clear from the current documentation. Does PinballX capture/record all screens simultaneously as PBX Recorder does, or does PinballX capture the screens sequentially like Popper and PinballY?

PBX Recorder uses a two pass approach - first pass for capturing raw frames and second pass for transcoding/compression. Does PinballX use a two pass approach or a single pass approach (i.e., real-time compression)?

PinballX is capable of using ffmpeg for the capture application, but can it use the newer ddagrab filter for potentially capturing FP full desktop screen? The FP port for PBX Recorder replaced ffmpeg with OBS as the capture application but it was a little harder for users as it requires a custom profile input, etc. It would be nice to use ffmpeg for all systems. Yeah, there is capturing through NVidia ShadowPlay but the PinballX documentation says that it is only for playfield capture?

I don't think I can face updating PBX Recorder at this point because of all of the supported customizations allowed with current front-ends. Screenres.txt allows any number of comments plus separate custom res files. Users can structure tables pretty much however they want. More ini stuff with Visual Pinball and dmdext. It's too difficult for me to allow for all the possibilities. Was hoping for comparable features from any current front-end.

 

 

[scutters]

As far as i know based on log files etc;

5 hours ago, Carny_Priest said:

It's not clear from the current documentation. Does PinballX capture/record all screens simultaneously as PBX Recorder does, or does PinballX capture the screens sequentially like Popper and PinballY?

Sequential

5 hours ago, Carny_Priest said:

PBX Recorder uses a two pass approach - first pass for capturing raw frames and second pass for transcoding/compression. Does PinballX use a two pass approach or a single pass approach (i.e., real-time compression)?

PinballX uses two pass (at least for ffmpeg capture). Pbx recorder can use real time or two pass in a later version (https://forums.gameex.com/forums/topic/28516-pbx-recorder-captures-playfield-backglass-and-dmd-videos-and-images/?do=findComment&comment=194355)

5 hours ago, Carny_Priest said:

PinballX is capable of using ffmpeg for the capture application, but can it use the newer ddagrab filter for potentially capturing FP full desktop screen? The FP port for PBX Recorder replaced ffmpeg with OBS as the capture application but it was a little harder for users as it requires a custom profile input, etc. It would be nice to use ffmpeg for all systems. Yeah, there is capturing through NVidia ShadowPlay but the PinballX documentation says that it is only for playfield capture?

Would need a change to PinballX to use ddagrab with ffmpeg for FP (and users to update their ffmpeg copies), probably a feature request. Think the shadowplay option is actually for all screens but probably only mentions playfield as that is (was) the problematic screen to capture for opengl apps with ffmpeg, never loaded geforce experience on the cab so don't know for sure ( @Mike_da_Spike can probably answer)

5 hours ago, Carny_Priest said:

I don't think I can face updating PBX Recorder at this point because of all of the supported customizations allowed with current front-ends. Screenres.txt allows any number of comments plus separate custom res files. Users can structure tables pretty much however they want. More ini stuff with Visual Pinball and dmdext. It's too difficult for me to allow for all the possibilities. Was hoping for comparable features from any current front-end.

So long as the default screenres.txt defines the full backglass area etc to match PinballX screens then i don't think the .res files will matter, if a B2S uses only part of a screen due to the .res file then pbxrecorder would still capture the full area - and that it was you'd want to avoid it getting stretched when displayed in PinballX.  But the screenres.txt file could be located somewhere other then the Tables folder now.

 

Probably needs @Tom Speirs to confirm most of what i've said above though!

 

[Mike_da_Spike]

3 minutes ago, scutters said:

Yeah, there is capturing through NVidia ShadowPlay but the PinballX documentation says that it is only for playfield capture?

Yeah, i think it is a limitation of nvidia itself. It just records the main display. But you are free to set the resolution of the capture and fps (thought up to 60fps)

[Tom Speirs]

The above is correct. My reasoning was for higher performance and to lower resources on the system. I can do 4k 60fps ]captures in hvec with no issues here. If you have and NVIDIA system it will fully utilize the hardware on that. AMD support in FFMPEG is still limited as far as I know though. Im not sure how PBXRecorder handles that stuff.

[Carny_Priest]

Thanks for all the responses! I've been out of the scene for awhile. I didn't realize that PBX Recorder had been updated to capture in 1 pass. I have an ancient CPU, so I probably still have to use a two pass approach.

[Carny_Priest]

I haven't looked at the latest PBX Recorder source. I'm pretty sure that it uses the gdigrab filter. It is CPU focused, so I don't think the GPU make matters at all. However, I'm guessing that it may not capture OpenGL like FP. And that may pose an issue for VPX as well, when players migrate over to the 10.8 GL version for it's performance and advanced features.