Recording a video capture of Lemmings Revolution

[chaos_defrost]

As you may or may not know, I've had a Lemmings Revolution Let's Play lines up for a bit now. On Friday, geoo and I had everything set up for the first video of it, or so we thought -- this happened. I'm using Camtasia Studio 7 to record, but none of the codecs I am trying are working right -- they all either give incredible framerate drop, that disco effect, or both. I have GuyPerfect's patch on the game.

I'd like to continue this LP proper, but can't until I figure out how to record the screen right. Thanks in advance for any ideas.

[GuyPerfect]

Lemmings Revolution giving incomplete screen captures is a known issue which has been brought up before. I doubt there's much of a remedy for it, so you won't be able to use screen capture software to get the job done.

Instead, I recommend recording your video card's output signal. Most off-the-shelf video cards have auxiliary output, be it S-Video or Component, in addition to the standard VGA or DVI port. On the other hand, most video cards placed into pre-assembled computers like HP or Dell almost always do NOT have additional outputs.

I generally build my own computers, but I'm currently on a Dell because it's better than what I had and through roundabout means I got it for free. It may be evil, but it was free evil. What I do is use a device that accepts the VGA output of my video card, duplicates the signal so I can still use the monitor with it, and also converts the signal and outputs it as both Composite (not to be confused with Component) and S-Video. Neither of those formats is especially useful for game recording, unless you're talking old games with low resolutions... like Lemmings Revolution.

[ccexplore]

Somewhere in the thread GuyPerfect referenced above is some mention of DXWind which supposedly allows one to play certain Windows full-screen games in windowed mode instead, although I don't know whether in that thread the issue of making DXWind work with GuyPerfect's patch was ever resolved or not.  It's possible that software screen capture might work better in windowed mode (pure speculation though, I certainly haven't tried myself).

A smartphone or tablet with video recording capability may also work in a pinch.  I'm sure the quality would kinda suck, but it might be good enough for a relatively low-res game like Lemmings Revolution? 

[ccexplore]

Actually, I have a slightly better idea of something you can try, even though most likely it won't do you any good.   See if your video capturing software have some option related to trying to capture the mouse cursor in the video, and disable that.

It's a pretty random idea and to be honest I don't have much confidence in it helping.  The thing is, I know screen capturing via PrintScreen key seem to work okay at least on my machines (and I don't recall any flickering on the screen when doing so), so in theory video capturing software should have success capturing video from the game without the flashing.  The flashing aspect of it I have to think is partly due to something the video capturing software is doing.

Framerate however may simply be a matter of how much resources (CPU, GPU, RAM) it takes to do the software video capture plus the resources required to run the game itself.  Besides using the best machine you have available and trying out different codecs (and rate of capture of course), I'm out of ideas on that one.  The hardware recording solution GuyPerfect and I mentioned are the only sure way to eliminate this sort of problem.

[GuyPerfect]

You might also be able to do some tricks with VMware Player (a free, personal-use VM) and capture output from that. VirtualBox won't give you DirectX 4 support, though, so Lemmings Revolution can't be played on it.

[ccexplore]

I gave it a try last night with CamStudio and have observed the "flashing" issue.  Framerate is decent though.

Unfortunately it does look like the flashing issue may indeed be something about the game.  I suspect maybe a timing issue whereby during the game's regular cycle of screen refreshes, there are certain small portions of time in each refresh cycle where it may not be possible for other programs to grab a screen capture.  When taking screenshots you are unlikely to hit the "blackout portions", but when repeatingly taking captures of the screen like for videos, inevitably you will hit the blackouts every now and then.

I tried changing the capturing framerate but so far that hasn't helped.  The theory is that if we capture at the exact same rate as the game's refreshing the screen, staying perfectly in sync with the game, it may be possible to keep avoiding the blackout periods cycle after cycle.  Of course, in practice it's not easy to keep two programs perfectly in sync, so I'm not surprised this didn't help.  On the other hand, when I played back the movie so far it doesn't seem like it's actually capturing at the rate I specified either, so I may have to look more into it.

An obvious question: how many video capturing software have you guys tried so far?  If nothing else, seeing the same flashing problem from multiple video capturing software trying to record L.R. would help bolster my theory somewhat.

If one were able to build a modified version of a software video capturing program like CamStudio, or write their own, a likely viable workaround is to check each frame captured to make sure it's not all black, and if so retry the capture immediately a few more times until the program can get a good frame.  I may look into this if I have gobs of free time, but that hasn't been the case for a long time.

For now, capturing with a second hardware device is the only sure bet for this problem.

[Pooty]

I just attempted to record Lemmings Revolution on my Windows 8 laptop using the screen recorder Bandicam. Although I wasn't able to get GuyPerfect's patch to work, I didn't have the flashing issue. No idea if it's because of Bandicam, my version of Lemmings Revolution or (dare I say it) Windows 8! *ComedyFace*

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkQenNqikTQ

[mobius]

oh yeah, I don't why I didn't think of it sooner, but Pirohiko on youtube made a whole walkthrough without any problems (other than the usual discoloration before Guys' patch)

maybe you could contact him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oUW_jWn4Ls

[ccexplore]

I just attempted to record Lemmings Revolution on my Windows 8 laptop using the screen recorder Bandicam. Although I wasn't able to get GuyPerfect's patch to work, I didn't have the flashing issue. No idea if it's because of Bandicam, my version of Lemmings Revolution or (dare I say it) Windows 8! *ComedyFace*

I've confirmed the same thing on Win7 with GP's patch.  It makes sense since this program apparently has a specific mode for capturing DirectX/OpenGL windows used in most games, so it's probably better designed to deal with video capturing for those types of things.

The only downside is that the free unregistered version of Bandicam limits you to 10 minutes of recording and puts a watermark at the top of the video frame.  The watermark is actually relatively small, discrete and tolerable (it fits in the ceiling of the L.R. cylinder and horizontally centered, and therefore won't cover anything up, unless you are in zoomed-in mode).  The length limit however may get in the way though.  I haven't tested that aspect, but even if it simply forces you to continue capture to another video file every 10 minutes (as opposed to no more capturing at all), that'll get annoying fast.

The point is, keep looking and trying different video capturing programs.  We know at least one works, there might be others that are free with less restrictions.