Forum:Converting ttyrec files into video

< Forum:Watercooler

I don't have a machine fast enough to record video from the desktop at anything greater than about 2 FPS. From what I've seen, the common way to make nethack videos is to record the desktop while playing back a ttyrec file at a certain speed. This doesn't work for me because my machine isn't fast enough to capture the desktop at a reasonable speed.

It seems there should be some VLC plugin or other method of directly converting a ttyrec file to ogg video or another format. 20 minutes of webcrawling hasn't turned up anything. Does anyone know of a solution?

- Davek 07:43, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Inspired by this question, I did a quick and dirty hack to IPBT so it saved each frame of ttyrec as a png. I then used mencoder to create videos (without the delays): Scorchgeek's 2h47m ascension and Maud's 2135 turn ascension. --paxed 21:18, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

I owe you a beer there, paxed. Is this patch available somewhere? -- Davek 01:55, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Not yet; it's a hack that just makes IPBT call a screenshotting program... I'll put it up once I've cleaned it up and fixed few things in it. --paxed 07:37, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

I'll take even the unpolished version. I've built ipbt, but it would save me some time if I didn't have to figure out where to put the screen capture call. A "real" implementation would have to know how to convert a rendered terminal frame into an image, and that would take forever. -- Davek 04:07, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

OK, the diff against the IPBT svn head is here. It adds a new commandline switch -S (which takes a number as a parameter), and will invoke /usr/bin/scrot for each frame of the ttyrec. --paxed 15:16, 26 February 2011 (UTC)