Built-in video recorderOuterra comes with a built-in raw video capture, that produces video files in Y4M format. These raw video files can be open by several programs directly, for example VLC or Mplayer. However, you don't have to use the raw files - after you quit the application, a dialog box offering automatic conversion of previously captured videos will appear. It will convert raw video files into compressed Webm (
http://www.webmproject.org/users/) format, suitable for direct upload to YouTube.
The bin/video/videomaker.exe tool will be automatically launched upon exiting Outerra, whenever there are some raw video files captured, and offer to convert them. Note that the input files (*.y4m, *.wav) will be deleted after a successful conversion.
If you want to use the raw files instead, just press cancel in the initial dialog.
Video compression parameters to use can be altered in the bin/video/video.cfg file. For the list of possible options, see
http://www.webmproject.org/docs/encoder-parameters/For the best results:
- set the active audio input to capture sound from the audio card, usually named as "stereo mix". If you don't see such a recording device listed, it may be necessary to right click in the recording devices window and check "Show Disabled Devices".
- it's best to change the disk to which the Y4M videos are being captured, so that it isn't affected by disk transfers from other parts, like model loading and terrain data streaming. To redirect where the Y4M and WAV files are written, please edit the eng.cfg file, changing the "videos_dir" to point elsewhere, e.g videos_dir = "e:\videos\"
- for stable recording, lock the fps to the display's refresh rate (or to the half of it) of your display running at 60Hz (you can do it in the graphics config via Vertical Sync setting). In this mode the recorder simply takes each frame and writes it to the disk, whereas in the unsynchronized mode (default one) it picks frames that are closest to the desired recording frame position. Unless your frame rate is quite high it can produce jitter.
Note: on ATI cards it's currently not possible to sync to the half of the display refresh rate due to a bug in their OpenGL driver.
Using external tools (Fraps ...)Outerra by default blocks 3rd party programs from injecting into the rendering loop, since these programs are notoriously unstable when they have to work in the setup that Outerra uses (OpenGL 3.3+ context and separate app and rendering threads). They often cause intermittent crashes that look like an instability of Outerra itself, so we decided to prevent them from hooking into the rendering pipeline.
However, if you want to use these third party programs, you may change the default behavior by running outerra.exe with -allowext argument from the command line.
