Warzone 2100 Forums

What's the easiest way to record a warzone game on video under linux? I've used a few tools already (xvidcap, recordMyDesktop), but they aren't able to capture the 3d graphics.
(putting a camera in front of the screen is not discussed )

Just a little success story: suddenly found out that gtk_recordMyDesktop does the job well enough. The "Full shots at every frame" button makes sure 3d content is recorded, and without "Encode on the fly", it doesn't affect game performance too much. Unfortunately, this doesn't record game in fullscreen anyway, but recording windowed game works well.

One of the problems is that you can occasionally move the window, and the recording area will remain on its place, recording the desktop below the window, hence the name of the application. One of the solutions is to use some more advanced window manager that allows you to 1. undecorate the game window, so that you couldn't move it via the titlebar by mistake and to 2. put the game always on top, so that you couldn't hide it behind some other window. GNOME's metacity sucks; not sure about KDE's kwin4, haven't seen it for a while. As for me, i'm using openbox, so i just added the following to the applications section of the config:

gnome sucks? lol... anyways.... right click on upper application and click on "stay always on top".... or make a shortcut
gconf-editor
/apps/metacity/window_keybindings/toggle_above

ill give record my desktop another try... last time i felt the performance drop.
tmp

gnome sucks? lol...

Rather metacity. I don't have anything against gnome.

toggle_above

Hmm, nice. What about undecorate?
What about setting this as default for warzone2100?

When I tried screen recording tools, only ffmpeg (as described in e.g. http://verb3k.wordpress.com/2010/01/26/ ... -on-linux/) worked without noticeable slowdown. I didn't get it to record sound (didn't try long though), but you can set openal to output a wav file and put them together manually. It also records fullscreen games, just set it to record the game resolution.

only ffmpeg (as described in e.g. http://verb3k.wordpress.com/2010/01/26/ ... -on-linux/) worked without noticeable slowdown

Nice one! But seems to bring in some artefacts for me. /me hates ATI Uhh

But the file size with -vpre lossless_ultrafast is obviously smaller than what gtk-recordMyDesktop gives, and fps around 14 on my pc (when capturing 800x480) is good enough. Still, file size wasn't a problem so far.

I haven't tested these myself, but:
http://blog.smr.co.in/linux/graps-captu ... gl-frames/
http://nullkey.ath.cx/projects/glc

Good luck.

Thanks!
Where were you guys half a year ago when i asked this question? (:

NoQ wrote:Thanks!

I am curious, which one did the trick for you?

/me wrote:Just a little success story: suddenly found out that gtk-recordMyDesktop does the job well enough.

Don't worry, it's all right, i know how hard it is to read someone else's messages!

NoQ wrote:

/me wrote:Just a little success story: suddenly found out that gtk-recordMyDesktop does the job well enough.

Don't worry, it's all right, i know how hard it is to read someone else's messages!

That's an unfair comment. You followed that up with that that program brought in artefacts so I thought that the search was still on.

Ok never mind. Sorry for making this unclear.

Bump. That's what i've been using for dozens of videos without any obvious problems:
Usage: Install ffmpeg and sox packages. Use your audio mixer to set audio capture device to "Mix" ("Monitor", whatever). Find a good fixed position for the Warzone 2100 window (eg., top left corner of the screen. hint: with some window managers, you can force the position of the window to be always the same). Save this text as an .sh script, adjust the necessary settings (resolution, frame rate, window position ("shift") etc.) and run in the console. When you want to stop the recording, press Ctrl+C once and then let it finish some post-processing (should be relatively fast; no video re-encoding occurs).

Technical: I'm using divx codec for video, encoding on the fly. The resulting video is ready for youtube upload, even though the quality is lossy; divx with default settings also seems to be slightly faster than h264 -vpre lossless_ultrafast. Audio is captured with sox (because it is free from some weird desync problems that occur when i use pure ffmpeg), and a-v sync information is piped to ffmpeg, but the audio itself is stored in a separate file instead. Then, after the recording, the second command assembles the final .avi file from raw audio and video files created by the first command; encoding audio to mp3 happens here as well.