AVS to AVI , PLEASE MAKE THIS HAPPEN FINALLY

Me2 wanna record AVS to AVI, directly. Now I use Hypercam, but the quality is not very good, although I have fast 'puter and raid 0 hdd's. Come on u kewl nerds make this one (I read AVS-grabber or whatever) finally. THNX 😛

I dont know if this works but allways you can try.

Put AVS into Fullscreen and put a Video Camera input to the Monitor output and record it...i dont know if it works but if it does you can watch AVS from TV...nice

more trouble than it's worth?

With the output to TV, you could record to a VHS tape. Hopefully your vid card has an input, because you can input from the tape/VHS. Then encode it on the hard drive to AVI.

or instead of vhs reccord it to dvd, then dvd rip it to avi or mpeg

Working on it

I'm working on AVSGrabber... it's an APE that you can insert on an arbitrary point in an AVS to grab the image to an .avi file. You can select any codec you have installed, but it's better to grab it uncompressed first and encode it later (so you don't slow down AVS while grabbing).

It's almost finished, except the uncompressed data output is broken: it outputs 16-color quality images. Will try fixing it tomorrow.

Sneak-preview: avsgrabber.jpg

PS: Programmers (no-one for that matter) appreciate being called nerds 😛

cool beans!

UnConeD that looks very fresh uncompressed on that jpeg.
Please keep us posted....thanks.

good work

looks good. will it also record the sound?

UnConeD, 😎 u RULE 😎 I almost cannot wait for it, it will be a small revolution! A very handy tool for video editors..

Ziet er goed uit!

HI UnconeD

I'm working on this too, how far are you from completion?
Will post when finished...

Pretty much done

There are 2 issues I still have:

- Uncompressed video comes out as 16-color video.

- Sometimes it fails to overwrite on an existing file you just recorded.

Other than that it's pretty much done.

Will compressing it to DivX slow it down much? Can we see it yet?

avs saver

Hi UNconeD

I've started getting your 16 colour effect as well!

It actually is nothing to do with the file, its just the way windows displays it-- i think there must be a wrong entry in the BITMAPINFOHEADER. it doesn't even show up on all machines. in any case if you view the avi in an editing package like virtualdub it looks perfect./

Anyway if any of you want to sneak a preview of my saver plugin you can grab it here:



it crashes when finishing a save on some machines.

I'd love to hear from you if you do try it (anyone)-

I'd love to know if it works, what framerate you can get and the details of your machine- OS, directX/WMP version, amount of RAM etc.

I'm not going to release it fully until i figure out the header and crashing issues.

😉 TIM

ps do you have any ideas for how to do the sound recording thing? I think if one looks in the winamp SDK it will involve writing another plugin that shunts the audio to AVS.... which will probably hit performance badly. for now i'm gonna be filming the music/visuals together onto a camcorder, as a reference for syncing afterwards.

times2 >> go back and work on that saver coz it makes the avs slow when running music and it don't get any good quality either

??

hey montana -- 2 things

1) of couse its gonna slow down avs- what do you expect, magic?

2) if you bothered to read the mail you'd realise that the poor quality comes from windows media player not playing it back properly.

and as for going back to try again- who do you think you are!?

t

who the fuck i am? i'm a muthafucker who was trying to help you, when playing a song and running your saver the song and the avs suddenly slows down, thats what i mean by work on yo shit

Doesn't work with me 🙁

I've just tested this APE but the AVI file it creates doesn't look like my preset at all I've attached an example of it with this msg. (rename it to .avi) This is what I get to see when I try to play the file. I run use Win ME on a P-III 450 mhz, 256 MB RAM, 32 MB Viper V770. If there's any more you'd like to know just let me hear it good luck with this APE. 🙂

/EDIT
hmmm the attaching here at winamp isn't working as it should if you give me your email I'll send it to you

hey Times2

great! finally a tool for writing avs to disk

my experience :

- works, but winamp2.78 on windows xp (with asus geforce2 gts) crashes after stop recording, very annoying
- it seems that pixel quality depends on how large u make the window
- 16 colors could be, but I am little color blind, so I am not sure. I use nicemc plugin in winamp to play moviez

keep on the great work!
👍

so lemme get this stright this this app we can create our own ape's or avi's to use in avs normaly like a effects list but! we cant edit that there we'd have to reopen that ape in normal a normal avs to change the disired effect?

Times,

the files that are produced are also not good, I get a lot of crashes when trying to open them. Some I can see. None will open in premiere..

BP2k1: No. It saves the avs to an .avi video file, not an APE! It is an APE that you just insert into a preset to start recording.

Oh yeah and Montana38: Yes. It will slow AVS down. Nothing you can do about it so just shut up. The bad quality comes from Windows Media Player not playing it right. View it in VirtualDub instead.

montana: well i suggest you stop using your mommmas old 386 and buy a real computer! as for help: what help?

UNconeD: any ideas on the 16 colour problem?? i've tried chnaging to BITMAPV$HEADER or BITMAPINFO, theres something that my program isn't writing correctly....> no real information in the platform SDK but if i open a 'funny file' in virtualdub and save it, it grows by a few hundered bytes, and works perfectly. i think it could be to do with the colour tables?

perplexd

t

montana: well i suggest you stop using your mommmas old 386 and buy a real computer! as for help: what help?

/me use a 1 GHZ and yo fucking avs saver is crap
i wonder if the avs is only good when running at more than 4 fps , what's the fucking meaning of using yo fucking saver,
(me curse, me like cursing, u don't like cursing, well fuck you)

AVSGrabber

I've finished up my version of an AVS2AVI APE... AVSGrabber.

Known bugs:
- The 'uncompressed = 16 colors'-bug.
- Overwriting can sometimes fail if the file is in use.

It's got a few more features than saver.ape, but you should try both.

It's unsupported software: it shouldn't do any harm, but if it kills your mother by shooting a bolt of electricity through the screen, down the stairs, across the living room and into the kitchen, I won't be held responsable 🙂. If you can't get it to work, tough. If you want to send in a bug report, please do, but only with enough information (system description, software used and try to pinpoint the how's and when's of the bug).

It will, of course, slow down AVS a bit. That's because it has to convert and flip the 32-bit AVS data into 24-bit data before most codecs will accept it. I've found a way to avoid this, but then it'll only work on uncompressed output. Might consider implementing this later.

Get it from: http://avs.acko.net/


Note to Montana38: Don't say something is crap until you can do better. You probably have *no* idea what's going on when that AVI saver is doing things, but I can assure you it's not sitting idly having a cup of coffee. That's why it slows AVS down. By the way, you should try writing correct english sentences, not using stupid abbreviations (u ?) and using punctuation marks. It lessens the 10-year-old look.

Sound recording

Sound recording should be *very* tricky. I can see a few problems:

- You can't grab the audio data through AVS (because it's just provided as a visualisation means rather than an exact signal). A DSP might work, but you have to take things like processing delays into account. Getting the audio over to the AVS would be problem too.

- AVS doesn't maintain a constant framerate... synching sound to the images will almost never work completely.


Here's a solution that might be worth something:

- Create both an AVS Grabber (ape) and a sound grabber (DSP or maybe output plug-in).
- Make sure they start and stop at exactly the same time using a synching mechanism.
- Use an editing program to multiplex the audio and video stream.

(i'm not alowed 2 curse anymore unlesse i wanna get banned so)
msg 2 unconed: *beep* *beep* *beep* *beep* *beep* *beep* *beep*

you get the picture

AVI output beta 2

Hi all, if you're interested I've beta 2 of MY output plugin ready for download 😉

Major bugfixes, it also fixes the 16-colour problem (UNconeD: its a question of filling in all of the BITMAPINFOHEADER fields), and a bit of performance enhancement.

Theres also a RAW mode which basically rips the AVS screen buffer as fast as possible, but as far as i can tell, only windows media player can understand it. (UnconeD: I presume this is what you have in mind for 32-bit files: great minds think alike?)

As before you can download it from:



UnconeD: As for the sound issue, as you say it might be possible to create a soundtrack from the vis data (it would be very low quiality). but for my purposes (using AVS to create effects for music videos) I'm quite happy to put in an effect that will let me recognise the start of the song and then just sync it up in premiere or digital fusion.

offer

UnconeD: 1 more thing, have you made any more apes? i'll show you mine if you show me yours...

t

No other APE's

I haven't made any decent other APE's than AVSGrabber. First I tried making a 5x5 convolution matrix effect (like a custom filter, it allows you to define the color of a pixel in relation to itself and the 5x5 surrounding grid). Unfortunately it was very slow (I wrote it in assembly though) and slightly buggy. I simplified this to an Embossing filter which was still slow, but a bit faster. Never released either of them though, because they weren't near good.

As far as the '32-bit' mode is concerned, I currently have a set of compiler-conditions that allows me to change the APE into two things:
- The AVS buffer is flipped vertically and converted from 32-bit to 24-bit. Almost any codec will accept this format.

- The AVS buffer is just kept the way it is (top-down and 32-bit). The only codec I think worked was uncompressed, and maybe DivX, not sure.

I wanted to ask you if you used assembly and/or MMX in your APE's. I used regular x86 assembly (no MMX) here and there to speed things up, but nothing substantial really. You need to use MMX however to do fast operations on pixels, so that's why I still haven't released any custom filters yet (don't know MMX, if you have a good resource about it, please forward it). I don't have the code for my ape's here though (at univ atm), so I can't 'show you mine' :P.

On to the issue of sound. I don't know how AVS works, but I do know how regular vis plug-ins work: WinAMP calls a function of the plug-in, equivalent to the render() method of an APE, every 'tick'. The traditional way of programming a plug-in was to draw everything on this 'tick'. Unfortunately this made the plug-in stop when you were inside a modal dialog or when music had stopped. The fact that AVS doesn't do this, means it has a separate drawing thread. Probably, with every tick, the internal sound data gets updated with the new version. However because the drawing of frames is independent, you have no sure way of knowing that no frames of sound have been dropped. If you were to put all the sound-data together, you'd most probably end up with a cut-up piece of music (unless you have a near-empty AVS preset, so that every frame of music is actually used).

Note #2 to Montana: do you also insult people in public you don't know and call whatever they do crap? Gee, you'll get really far with that attitude. Please grow up and try to post only comments that will be interesting to *other* people than yourself.

UNconeD: no i dont use assembly... i don't think in this case it would make much difference as the main use of CPU is on the call to the vfw32 api. i've written the packing loop pretty efficiently i think.

if i compare RAW (32-bit) mode with 24-bit mode in my plugin, i estimate raw mode is around 20-30% faster. but raw mode is just making the API call and doing very little else! so i estimate the cost of packing every pixel in the frame using c++ at 15-25% of the cost of transferring a frame with the api. and an assembly program could only hope to approach this improvement... unless i start rewriting vfw32.lib in assembly!!!

hey i'm tired of conversing through this really slow site. can you mail me at pixelcorps@forwind.net if you want to continue this (interesting) discussion...