Re: [hatari-devel] Hatari video recording

[Vincent Rivière <vincent.riviere@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 19/11/2020 at 10:46, Douglas Little wrote:
> Anyway the videos recorded below that limit work well - no frame drops in 
> the recording and FFMPEG can convert the stream to MP4 no problem.

When I recorded my Lethal Xcess Longplay with Hatari, 2 years ago, I 
struggled a lot.

I tried PNG compression, but it was too slow, so I finally used uncompressed 
AVI output. Of course, I quickly hit the 4 GB limit. So I used a newer 
Hatari build on Linux where it was fixed.

Another issue was the video resolution. By default, the Hatari window is 
zoomed 2 or 3 times to avoid a tiny window on a big screen. That's very 
fine. Unfortunately, the video output uses such zoomed resolution. This 
causes a video output resolution bigger than the native Atari resolution. I 
consider this as unexpected. Hatari should fix that, or at least, provide an 
option. Consequence is that uncompressed video files become more and more 
huge. Finally, I used this solution: run hatari with --max-width 400. So I 
played with a tiny window. This was not easy, specially for a shoot'em up, 
but I finally managed to do what I planned.

Finally, I recorded each level separately. This produced several AVI files 
between 5 and 8 GB. Then I post-processed that with ffmpeg. And finally, I'm 
pretty glad of the result:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCmZTtKgfhs

Despite difficulties, many thanks to the Hatari team for having made this 
possible.

I have only one regret: I was persuaded that YouTube only allowed 16/9 
videos. This is completely wrong. It actually allow custom ratios, such as 
1350x1080. But as I didn't know that, I letterboxed my video in 16/9. This 
doesn't matter on computer screens, but it shows ugly side bands when 
watched vertically on smartphone. Anyway, I will fix that in future videos. 
Rule of thumb: never letterbox videos, use original ratios.

--
Vincent Rivière