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i'm not sure about adding music to them..

perhaps 2 versions, one with music, one without, then we can decide which is better.

Don't add music, to keep the file size down.

Holy moly, what did you do with the divx vid. It froze my system until the video ended. I could not even move my mouse! I have a 2400+AMD, so it is not too shabby, yet the video just killed my computer...

The colours in the vid are a bit odd. Screenshot

QUOTE Holy moly, what did you do with the divx vid. It froze my system until the video ended. I could not even move my mouse! I have a 2400+AMD, so it is not too shabby, yet the video just killed my computer...[/quote]

CPU utilization is at ~10% for me. I'm running a lower end dual-core Opteron, so I don't think its your processor Grimm. Maybe something with your codec(s)?

Have a link:

http://share.edge-of-reality.de/GreenHawk/AMP2/

For game capturing you can try Krut.
Free, open source and alive project. Get the latest release here.

For video stream compression I use X.264 (free, open source too) as a codec. It is the best AVC codec I have ever used and I tried a lot. Best way to use it is through MeGUI (free,open source too /smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile.gif" /> you will find it in the same webpage). Since you have a fast machine choose the HQ insane profile (you will get it through the autoupdate of MeGUI) and just modify the bitrate.

For audio I use WinAmp AAC encoder (through MeGUI too, not through WinAmp).

Upload a small video (100MB-200MB, sorry slow connection) somewhere in raw uncompressed format (audio and video) and I'll give you a hint of what I am talking about.

x.264 is insanely good. But you need a matching computer to play it as well. Thats an advantage of the DivX codec - playback is relatively light on the CPU.

ImmortalZ wrote:QUOTE (ImmortalZ @ Jan 29 2007, 03:35 PM) x.264 is insanely good. But you need a matching computer to play it as well. Thats an advantage of the DivX codec - playback is relatively light on the CPU.

Of the two samples I posted at filefront.com, the WMV is actually better quality. (I could probably wring out some better results from the DivX version.) It's still a bit CPU heavy at 800x600 though. I'll be sure to test these on my 1Ghz box just to make sure. My "play" box is a dual-core Athlon 64; quite speedy!

Regarding music: it probably won't make the filesize much larger. It's more likely to reduce the overall quality of narration though, depending on the music style and levels. Audio compresses very well; I can go all the way to 48Kbit and still get decent audio. Voice is quite compression tolerant.

Regarding the DivX version grinding to a halt... the DivX codec I'm using on my system is DivX 5.2.1 from Pinnacle Studio, though I use VLC (videolan.org) to play most DivX content I create. Maybe you have post-processing enabled?

Regarding Krut... never heard of it; anyone care to share a sample capture from Allegiance? I'm a bit hesitant to break out yet another capture utility now that Fraps is working well.

On the colors: Those are a bit lighter than I expected. I did some heavy gamma correction during the render to make text (chats, etc) legible. I'll probably resort to using the snap-zoom effect to point out onscreen text when necessary, and worry less about overall readability of the text in the video.

So the big question: are those a good quality vs. size tradeoff at 800x600? Any thoughts on the text readibility?

Text readability is good. I didn't realize that you did gamma correction on those videos. I use VLC for playback as well.

I did some testing on a 1280x720 video of The Incredibles. Playback on VLC takes ~40% of CPU on my Opteron165 (20% of each core - didn't know VLC was SMP optimized...). Considering the fact that older CPUs might not have things like SSE2 (which help the decodes a lot) or video acceleration of decoding (which help as well (7% in my tests)), we might have to skip that codec.

Your DivX video OTOH is 5% of CPU. /blink.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":o" border="0" alt="blink.gif" />

OK, you can see what I am talking about here.

1024x768 25fps video compressed at 1000kbps with X.264 (a little low but OK quality).
Mono sound at 44KHz at 40kbps using WinAmp AAC.

30secs --> 3.942.743 Bytes

For this file I get no more than 50% CPU utilization to my Mobile AMD Sempron 3100+ (single core at 1.58GHz). Fairly decent given the high resolution.

I think VLC is all you need to play it but I am not sure (I use Media Player Classic, ffdShow and Haali Media Splitter --> All here!).