Since people have been asking about it, here's a short guide to record real-time as you play in LFS.

The problem with mechanical harddrives
Mechanical harddrives are cheap, so most computers have this type of harddrive these days. Solid State Drives (SSD) are still, sadely, quite expensive. When you record video in real-time, you want as little impact on the computers general performance as possible to reserve it for all the other work it has to do to run your game at decent frame rates. FRAPS is one of such program that will record video with a very CPU inexpensive compression, but at the cost of very high video bitrates. The bitrate of the video stream will in many cases exceed the speed at which a mechanical harddrive can store data. One way to help this is reducing the frame size, and FRAPS have an option to record half frames. Unfortunately this gives very low resolution video.

Trading HDD bandwidth for CPU time
The other solution is to spend alot more CPU time to compress the video more, reducing the bitrate. If you have a modern 4 core CPU and a mechanical harddrive, this can be the best trade of for the available resources of your computer. First of all we have to ditch FRAPS, as you can not change the video codec it uses to compress the video. And besides, FRAPS doesn't come with alot of options.

DXtory is similar to FRAPS, but has significant more options. One of them is you can scale the size of the frames exactly, i.e exactly 1280x720 (HD 720p). And you can use any video codec you like, as long it can encode in real-time. H264 has become a defacto standard for HD video, and you can download h264 compliant codecs for free. For DXtory I highly recommend x264vfw.

Setting up DXtory
Before you get to the steps in the images below, you should off course setup your prefered overlay and storage space settings. Note that DXtory can benchmark you storage device, and 70 MB/s should be quite alot more than required.



Select x264vfw as your codec, and the framerate to your preference. I have enabled VSync in LFS to avoid LFS rendering more frames than what my display can show, and thus spend unnecessary GPU time that also just makes my laptop hotter. This means I allways get 60 FPS ingame, and I like to record in 60 FPS. Since I record at the same frame rate my game is running, I also have checked the option to synchronize the recording rate to the game. But if the video codec for some reason should not record at your given frame rate, your game framerate will not suffer, unlike what would be the case with FRAPS. To ensure there is no problem with the rate at which the codec compresses frames, I display the "Write File FPS" which can be set in the overlay settings. To limit the CPU usage and bandwidth requirements for my harddrive, I scale down my frames to exactly 720p. Don't use clipping unless you want to record just specific areas on the screen.

Please not that Youtube only supports video of a maximum of 30 frames per second. So if you intent to upload your recorded video material directly to Youtube without any post processing, you will have to choose at maximum 30 FPS. I record at 60 FPS to blend the video frames during post production for a motion blur effect in the final 30 FPS video I upload to Youtube.



Select which audio source to record, and I recommend using uncompressed PCM. The addition bandwith PCM uses at 44,1 KHz @ 16 bit is neglectable: (44100 x 16 x 2) / 8000000 = 0.1764 MB/s
You can off course install i.e the LAME mp3 encode to encode to mp3 in real-time, at the cost of more CPU time. But with the relatively low bandwidth of uncompressed PCM audio, I just go with the least CPU intensive solution.



Only check these options if you are having trouble with DXtory or your video codec. Select the number of threads DXtory can assign your video codec, and I allways use limitations of the video frame rate to keep it at a tight leash. No need to record more frames than needed.

Setting up x264vfw
Set all the options exactly like this:



With the rate factor you can choose the bandwidth of the video stream. Lower the rate factor, the higher the bandwidth (and CPU usage). I find a setting around 18 to be good enough for video in 720p without using too much CPU time and making ridiculous file sizes. The sad part is Youtube. Once you've uploaded your video, Youtube will re-encode your video with really hard compression. You can probably use a rate factor up to 23 without the Youtube video quality getting degraded very much.

A little warning
The x264vfw can be quite CPU demanding, depending on the frame size for your videos, and rate factor. Your CPU will generate alot of extra heat doing all this work, and your CPU fan will probably be spinning at full. This will draw dust into your computer, fans and heatsink at a higher rate than it normally will when you are not recording. So you will have to be prepared to clean your fans and heatsinks a bit more often if you record alot. But don't worry about the computer catching fire. Modern CPUs have a few mechanisms to prevent it to get so hot it gets damaged, such as reducing its speed making the game completely unplayable.

Have fun!

wow, just fantastic. This is a great job my friend.

Thank you !




Take a look:



I want to see the tire temperature info on both corners just like the last print screen (White arrows). Because I will not be able to see the gaps between the front and back drivers during the race I don't know if that's possible even.

Cheers my friend!

Have one for 3 years now. Intel 330 180 Gb is 180 Euro. Thats 1 Euro/Gb. Very nice price. Samsung 830 256 Gb/200 Euro is even cheaper...

Reliable, silent, cool, fast. One of the best investments evah

If anyone can tell how to get that info bar in Ronus's 2nd screenshot I would be very gratefull. I use LFSRelax at the moment, but it can't cope with the open layouts.

Well, for stream capturing, there's no need for SSD's, as it's sequential writes.
Much cheaper&better to have few HD's in striping (RAID0), but even without it, it's fine.

Hmm, this is what I feared when you spoke about it on the server. I don't think you can change it, unless you turn on or off any additional on-screen info. I see you allready have turned on virtual instruments. So I don't know any other method of moving the tyre infos.


Depends entirely on video resolution and compression used. For 1080p compressed with DXtory YUV24 at 60 FPS, you need about 165 MB/s sequential write speed. Most 10k RPM harddrives should handle it, but not a single 7200 RPM.
There's also problems with Windows when you get close to maxing out the HDDs write speed. Window will cue up I/O commands until the cue is full. Then DXtory (or whatever program that uses all the bandwidth) gets minimum priority until the cue is emptied. I had alot of problems with this when I wrote around 40-50 MB/s for prolonged sessions to my HDD, which is benchmarked to 75 MB/s.


Depends what you want for a harddrive; speed or storage space. The irony is that SSDs which can handle extremely high sequential speeds also are so small you'd fill them up within just a few hours at these speeds. The harddrives that has more than enough space is way to slow. The best trade of would off course be mechanical drives in RAID as Nick pointed out.


Type !opt in the chat, or press Shift + I (if I'm not mistaken) to bring up the personal Airio settings screen. There you can turn on and off alot of stuff.

Nice tutorial Skagen

@ langtall

I'm not 100% certain but I think Ronus may be using Aonio.
I've been using Aonio (by EQ Worry) for quite a while now, I actually prefer it to LFSRelax, easily configured so it doesn't overload the driver with too much info,,, check it out here http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=63817 if you haven't already seen it.

The one thing I have done is I "borrowed" the sound files from LFSRelax and used them for Aonio's "spotter" feature.

Thnx Obmit, that is the one I was looking for. Now to make a nice setup for it.

I'm using 9800m GTX vga which performs GREAT on almost all new games with only a few compromises in heavy duty games, BUT my HDD was always a performance bottleneck. From system startup, file management, loading performance and of course realtime video recording.

If i ever come to Denmark, i owe you a big hug and 2tons of beer
(If you come to Greece i can only give you cheap vacation and greek bitchezzz )

Finally, going to test this out!!!

Dang, if only the flight tickets to Greece was cheaper. 270 Euros

The cheaper i can find from Greece is at 290euros / connection point, Amsterdam... wanna meet there and have tons of beer?

This took me about 5 minutes...



http://www.ryanair.com/en/cheap-flight-destinations

Happy vacation Skagen

I wasnt searching from/to Oslo

I picked a location near Skagen !!! (LMFAO )
Thessaloniki - Albaek


I've travelled a lot with Ryanair which departs from the nearest commercial airport 50km near me (next one is 180, and 300+kms)
Low cost, but not for long flights....!!

Albaek?

Thats Denmark

Skagen is at Denmark

i don't know where CG.Skagen is from so i just supposed that's the location

You looked at the watches

For a long time I somehow thought he was from Sweden but no he is from Norway. Living in Oslo actually

Daym he's trolling us ....

Nice! If only I had the time to travel there.


Yes, haven't you seen the movie Troll Hunter about the Norwegian trolls?

Totally missed it!! 7/10 @ Imdb ??

hmmmm downloading

I'll have a look to this program later, my computer should be able to handle the stress of the recording, though i have only a HDD..

Before that i needs to learn how to actually edit the videos and such ;_;



Btw, would the video recording work well if i recorded it from a .mpr file, playing it back and using DXtory to record the race with it.

Or does it have to be a live race?

mpr replays, have lower car position refresh rate. The car's path is through some "checkpoints" on the track, and its movement is calculated through given physics. (same happens on live multiplayer spectate but with a better "refresh rate").

Of course you can record mpr playback, BUT the car's movement and steering wheel movement will be the same as you know it when spectating.

When you're recording yourself live when racing the steering/braking/throttle input is the smoothest possible

I already explained it to you
MorX explained everything.

In my opinion, .mpr should be fine for aerial camera views and stuff like that, now onboard recordings live is far better.

i want to add something now i have time at my office.

live for local player whose input is smooth = ok
live for any other player input is smoother than .mpr but STILL, way too "jerky".

Imho, lfs cant have good onboard captures either live or playback. The reason is the way it manages the waypoints and its refresh rate.

With this tool, or any other tool, you can record realtime, means that you get what you see.

This particular way, which Skagen suggested on this topic is for those who cant realtime record with fraps, cause of low hard drive bandwidth BUT have a strong CPU to encode the video in a lower bitrate (compressed) thus, lower bandwidth needed.

The "problem" with MPRs is actually not the relatively low sampling rate (I believe it is around 0.5 seconds intervals), but the fact that LFS does not interpolate at all between the sampling points. When spectating in real-time you can not interpolate since LFS can not possibly know before hand (i.e into the future) what the next sample point will be. But when playing back a MPR you have saved earlier, there is nothing that keeps LFS from looking ahead in the data to interpolate and smooth out the transition between the sample points. On one side this is good, the MPR is played back exactly as the replay data dictates. MPR playback is true to the replay data available and it makes no assumtions when data is lacking. But on the other hand, it makes for very bad onboard videos that show the steering wheel and pedal inputs (sound). I hate watching onboard videos from MPRs on Youtube because it makes LFS look bad; choppy and bugged.

That's why I record in real-time, because I want to capture all the details that is missing in between the sampling points of the MPR.

Thanks guys!

(And yeah Ronus, you explained it to me but just wanted to make sure how stuff works )

After today i have 4 day's off so i will be downloading this and trying to record live.. Skagen's videos are huge inspiration

The software suite I use for editing and post processing is too expensive for me to buy, so I don't want to make any guides or anything for it since I really don't own the software...
But there are some free alternatives, all though I haven't look too much into them, except VirtualDub. VirtualDub can be used to split and merge video, but I'm not sure if it can be used to overlay text and make nice transitions between scenes/clips. But it does have frame blending capabilities by both frame interpolation when changing the video playback rate, and motion blur post processing effects. Windows Movie Maker can make transitions and overlay text I believe (never used it). A combination of those two could provide some good editing options, unless you want to do advanced editing and effects.


You can record anything you like, as long it is a DirectX or OpenGL application or game.

Few problems;

For some reason i cant select the x264vfw codec, i've downloaded it and tried putting it everywhere but it just didnt pop up to the list.

And after recording, each video has this huge dxtory.com ad in the middle of the screen

And i couldnt even find the x264vfw configation folder anywhere ;_;


Positive thing is though, that with the xfire video codec it didnt lag at all to me and the video was relatively smooth.

Just a normal install of x264vfw, and it should register correctly in Windows and be available to any video software. Are you sure you downloaded the installer file, and not something else? Try removing it, and launch the installer as an administrator.

For the DXtory logo, you need do buy the program to get rid of it. It's cheap, and it's a spare time project of a single individual. And judging from the features it has compared to its competitors, there was really no hesitation for me to spend money on it.

I did download the one you linked in the first post, i'll try reinstalling it later

For the DXtory, i'll need to be practising with it for some time before i'm going to buy it, and also i need to learn how to edit stuff properly..

Test upload of mine, any opinions about Youtube's re-encoding SHITTY quality ???


Link



Ahhh fck sake .... 2013 and we still can't have high bitrate videos ....

Hey MorX,

did you already read this?

http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ ... 83876.aspx

Cheers

1st time reading this.

My main conclusion based on the article you've posted, is "fck this, 20mbit 720p encoding at LEAST!!".....