Horde3D

I was reading a thread on indiegamer.com this morning about doing cutscenes and it reminded me I wanted to have a video capture facility in my engine.

So using Revel and libxvidcore, I am now able to stream movies from my engine. I did a test upload onto youtube to see what thier HD video looks like and to see if they accept XVID encoded videos. Turns out they do!

Here's the vid. Note: Test content, the brains of the characters are only doing an idle wander and the collision system for the ground is being worked on so right now they only walk on a plane (hence penetrating the level).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jTkpTi12MA

You really need to watch in HD to have any idea of the quality of the encoding. I think its being re-encoded at the youtube end though, because that quality is pretty poor in comparison to the xvid source video. For a start the text in the buttons is almost entirely obscured.

At some point I plan on using libcurl to add an "upload to youtube" option to the game. Should be fun.

Next time I post a vid, it should some of the actual GAME

To avoid the re-encode and resulting quality issues, you need to make sure that your video is *exactly* 1280x720, *exactly* 24.25 or 30 frames per second, and uses either 128k Mono or 320k Stereo audio encoded with AAC or MP3. As for encoding, Xvid should work almost as well as DivX, and thus slightly worse than H.264.

If even one of those points is slightly off, YouTube will re-encode and lose a bunch of quality

_________________
Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

Cool stuff.

Sounds like you'd be interested in this gamasutra article about YouTube integration via their web APIs:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3 ... utube_.php

Yeah, I read that quite a while ago. It is definitely tempting. But youtube munches the video formats pretty badly. I might well add vimeo support though, vimeo seems to only HALF massacre video formats.

I suppose the other option is to add H264/AAC support. Anyone know of a free lib for that? I guess the format is encumbered though, which is why XVID seems so attractive.