Jnes Movie recording

posted by Jabo Jnes
One feature I've wanted to try for a while was recording movies with Jnes. With video sharing websites like YouTube so prevelant and accessible, this kind of feature is particularly meaningful these days. I decided to take a simple approach to this implementing this for the next version, similar to other emulators.

The feature breaks down into a recording mode that captures and initial jnes save state and subsequently records input at each frame to file. The playback mode can obviously then restore this movie and play it to the screen. While playing a movie back you can capture this to an AVI File using compression codecs such as XviD and DivX with audio.

As some of you may know Ninja Gaiden is one of my favorite games, altho I'm not a big fan of the more recent Xbox versions unfortunately. As a sample of the output Jnes creates I decided to capture myself playing the first level of this below and then upload this to YouTube.


And there you have it, hope you enjoy watching me play. I think this feature is very cool and I know it's something quite a few people have been asking for a while. Let me know what you think.
Comments 30

DrMario 1194447712000 #1

"The feature breaks down into a recording mode that captures and initial jnes save state and subsequently records input at each frame to file."
So do you mean it makes a macro from when your playing and than plays it back from a save state afterwards to export it to a video? That would be pretty cool cause then people could try to make and edit macros to play a game perfectly and beat it in record time but also there are enough free 3rd party macro utilities that can do this if you don't plan to implement it. I think this is a great emulator already, and has all the main features someone would want and is very stable.

Jabo 1194455724000 #2

So do you mean it makes a macro

Cool glad you like it! You could think of it like a macro, I don't know that there will be an editing facility necessarily, but the idea is similar for sure.

Kwasiblind 1195642886000 #3

This would be great. Those avi files could be used in front ends like GameEx so that it would be alot easier to get video previews of your games instead of snap shots while you scroll through them. I know theres other apps that do it, but having it all in one emulator performing that function would be great.

meh 1199330945000 #4

awesome. thanks for the best nes emu ever :D:D keep up the good work.

Jon 1209653349000 #5

I have Jnes. I can only record audio files, how did you record it so that it can play videos?

Jabo 1209799041000 #6

how did you record it so that it can play videos?


Go look under help on this website, there is a help topic now about how to do this in Jnes 1.0

twipley 1254562003000 #7

nice! i didn't even know this feature existed.

btw, what codec do you people use for comperession?

twipley 1254920081000 #8

I've liked your video on Ninja Gaiden. That's a nice game, indeed! I have done a video last Saturday, which I have just posted:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1oB8mjjjuc

Starsky 1276836333000 #9

First, thanks for the best emulator since Nesticle. Never had any problems playing games.

I do however, have an issue with the movie capture/playback. It appears it captured fine, and I can open and even dump to an AVI. BUT I can only see the files from browsing to the directory in the JNes. If I close JNES and try to find the movie with Explorer, its no where to be found.

I have already set up show hidden files & folders.

Supporting evidence...

http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j136/starskizzle/mm3.jpg

Thank you for all your work.
-Steve Starsky

Jabo 1276851387000 #10

I do however, have an issue with the movie capture/playback.

It seems the files are being redirected to a `VirtualStore`, that's why you can't find them in the Jnes folder, they aren't actually there. It's located in the following directory

C:\\Users\\%UserName%\\AppData\\Local\\VirtualStore\\Program Files (x86)\\Jnes

This affects Jnes because it's run with user permissions, if you ran Jnes as an administrator it would not do this redirection to the virtual store.

http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/5538
REPLY updated 1276969431000

Starsky 1278014701000 #11

Thank you for the info. Very interesting find regarding UAC.

d.S.1 1315521781000 #12

cool video you have there^^
but, i want to ask, how you record the video? it is in jmv format, how do i convert it, i google searched but so far i dint manage to find the solution><
thanks for your help^^

Jabo 1315558263000 #13

in the same menu where you recorded it, there is a playback facility, that is where you find the ability to convert it to an AVI.

d.S.1 1315588455000 #14

Thanks Jabo!!!
suddenly enlightened by your comments!!!

Sev 1341648537000 #15

I seem to have a problem. I saved the video by recording then stopping the recording. However, I didn't save it to a save state, so whenever I try to play the video and convert it to an avi, it converts for the right amount of time, but the avi is just a recording of the start menu

P4co 1343563016000 #16

Hi there,

For some reason no matter what settings or compression methods I choose I get a disturbing amount of blur on the video. Way more than in your example video. You wouldn't happen to know why..?

Thanks

billny33 1350458868000 #17

Hey I made a movie of me beating Mega Man 1 without dying once. The entire playthrough is recorded and goes on for 40 minutes. When I tried to copy it to avi though it didn't work, it seems to fail at anything over 4 gigs. Is there any way to compress this into a file small enough so that I can post on youtube or share the file? Also do you have to play the entire movie back on jnes in order to capture it as an avi?

The only avi files I successfully converted, I noticed are just between like 3-5 minutes long. Is it only made for short videos?

Jabo 1350493254000 #18

I would use some video compression to workaround this limitation, if you are using XviD as your compressor try lowering the bit rate of the video, you can find a guide on how to do this in the help section

Yoshistar95 1356436397000 #19

I've used a standard compression that's included in Windows XP, the movie was almost a hour long... the converting went wonderful!
I'm gonna try the DivX 6.9.2 compression as for the Hypercam 2 earlier, to see if the file size gets smaller. I've noticed by some huge videos that they didn't reached 1GB 30 minutes videos with some frame issues...

I have now a video that reached 1,5 GB 0_o the Gradius NES gameplay until loop 4, stage 2
I hope that the compressor will be accepted by Jnes, some of the compressers won't work

Moshi980 1362717662000 #20

Hey I love the Jnes emulator! It plays all my mega man games without any problems. However, the only I have is when it comes to video recording. I am trying to record my playthroughs of the mega man classic games (1-6). Yesterday I tried to record MM 5 in 5 minute segments. The actual movie recording is fine, even the encoding part. It's just when I try to play the .avi fil with windows media player, I get a video with static lines (like when you don't get reception on your TV), but strangely the audio for the video works perfectly. I just can't SEE the video. I don't know what to do. Assistance would be greatly appreciated!

Moshi980 1362740822000 #21

Sorry for double posting, but I started a new thread on emutalk.net and uploaded a screen shot to my problem. It is under the Jnes forum.

Jabo 1362850173000 #22

Gave it a glance - looks like some other people on Emutalk are trying to help as well, have a look. There is a guide on this site under the help section that shows how to use XviD and links to download it. I don't know of any issues with movie recording right now - you may also want to give a few different codecs a try to narrow down the issue.

Moshi980 1362905784000 #23

Ok. Thanks Jabo. I'll give it a try!

dusk 1370208475000 #24

is there any way to capture both audio and video at the same time?

Ben 1388230175000 #25

Very nice looking function I have recorded some game play now and I will see how it goes.

DulceVid 1389639367000 #26

Hi Jabo,
i tried to record the games but the emulator crashes. Is there any way to fix that?

Jabo 1391109098000 #27

The emulator may crash due to the video codec, if you use Xvid for example you have to close the statistics popup that Xvid Encoder launches otherwise it ends up crashing Jnes when I close the AVI recording context. If you have problems with Xvid I would recommend trying one of the other codecs such as Cinepak Radius which is included by default in Windows.

Dedprotectr 1396217284000 #28

Whenever I convert it to AVI it will be corrupted, pasting over the first four an a half minutes of footage... with the last four minutes. Cutting it in half, then switching the halves, slowing the audio, then puting it on a really high pitch... is windows XP just not compatible with anything?

Jon Doppelman 1419915457000 #29

When I do this, all I get is the audio and a black video. I've used multiple codecs, so I don't know what's the problem.

virtual local n... 1707678717000 #30

Now all is clear, thanks for an explanation.

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