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Full Version: Pause recording (using PCSX2's internal video recorder)
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Ok this is my first post so I want to quickly say that I love this program, it's fast (I'm able to play games at 2-4 times normal speed if I want to), upscaling makes dated PS2 graphics enjoyable to watch, and I haven't had any severe issues like games crashing while playing (at least not repeatedly)

But I'm having a minor issue at the moment, or rather I think this might actually be a missing feature. I've just read 12 or 13 threads on recording video from PCSX2, and I still haven't found anything on this.

Basically, I would like to be able to suspend/pause the video recording (using the internal video recorder), while still being able to play the game. When I decide I want to start recording again, I would simply re-press the "pause" button (if there is one), and it would continue recording, appending the newly captured frames to the existing avi file (and appending new audio samples to the existing wav file).

The reason I want to be able to do this is so that when I'm playing through portions of the game that I do not need/want to record, I can disable the frame limiter and fly through them. At the current moment, I would have to start the recording, stop the recording, minimize the screen so I can go and change the names of the two files that were generated, go back in, play until i reach the next segment I want to record and then start recording again. And then when it's time to start encoding, I have to stitch them together.

Now I did read the text below in the sticky but I figured there might be features even more hidden than movie capture itself:

"Movie Capture: This is a hidden() feature. By pressing F12 while running PCSX2 with GSdx a message box will appear. In the first field..."

Is this possible?

Also I'm not sure if this is available already, but considering that the internal recording greatly slows down the speed of the emulation and that most people don't need 60 (or 59.94) fps video recordings, would it be possible for the encoder to ignore every other frame, or every 2 out of 3 frames, etc? I'm currently recording FF XII, and 29.97 fps is more than enough for me, so if it's possible to regain some of that emulation speed by only encoding every other frame, that would work out awesome.

Thanks in advance
Unfortunately both of the features you requested have not been implemented. The video recorder is a really handy tool but still a low priority for a PS2 emulator...
Since audio and video are recorded separately from gsdx and spu2-x respectively, it would require modifications on both plugins to do any of these things and no one is up to it I'm afraid
Thanks for the reply. I guess I'll try tinkering with their code then, see if i can get one or both of those things to work and be stable.

Have you tried recording with an external tool? I've tried using Bandicam, but no matter what I do, I can't get it to sync well with PCSX2. There is some timing issue. And even though,

a) it's running perfectly smooth on PCSX2
b) the fps is an integer multiple of my capture rate (59.94 / 29.97)

every so often (in a very periodic fashion) the capture rate will effectively halve itself (new sets of two adjacent frames captured will be identical giving the illusion of half fps)

I've even tried on option where Bandicam limits the frame rate itself. For example, I would disable PCSX2's frame limiter and apply my own limit through Bandicam like 90fps and then record at 45 fps, thinking that maybe if Bandicam was managing the timing of the frames itself, it wouldn't have an issue as it knows when to expect the next frame, but the same thing still happened. So I'm a bit confused...
You can keep hitting F12 and giving each video a new name then splicing them together afterwards, the only drawback is the SPU2 plugin doesn't seem to like the starting and stopping, so you'd have a video and no sound Tongue
Yea, that's actually what I've been doing and the sound was actually working fine for me even after stopping and restarting the recording multiple times.

But i changed the name of the audio file from recording to something like test1, test2, etc every time i stopped a recording, because the SPU-X plugin always outputs "recording.wav" regardless of what filename you used for the video. In other words, it would keep overwriting the same file. Maybe that's why the audio wasn't working for you?

Either way, thanks for the help. I'm gonna see if I can either get Bandicam to sync well with PCSX2 or if I can modify the plugins to do what I want.
Just figured out what was causing the sync'ing problem while using external video recorders. The timestretch/sync'ing portion of SPU-X.

Luckily, I have external audio hardware, so I can route my output back as an input and make the video capturing utility capture audio samples from my "microphone" so there's no hang up. And no, using What U Hear didn't work.

Did a test run and it's flawless.

Just posting this in case anyone else has this issue so if they land on this thread, they might be able to figure out a way around it.