Experimental Video Rendering - UPDATED 8.1.2011

[TR56]

Rainer, your video describes the (to) low bit rate very well - Thanks. I dropped 'Constant Quality Variable Bit Rate' and were able to set bitrate to 1000 as you displayed in your video.
But the rendering itself didn't better bring results.
When I first searched theis form I found a similar entry from user "sohospa" from 22 Apr 2011, 20:10 and I mailed to if he had found a solution. His answer came this morning but he di not find way for better results. He suspected it could be a VISTA problem - now it it would be a good idea to to if it is so or not. Did anyone with OS Vista could render wmv-files successfully?

Greetings
Thomas

[noisy]

Thomas,

which version of Vista do you use, 32 or 64 bit, SP1?
On my second PC I still have Vista 64 bit installed, I'll check if rendering works there.
Can you tell me your hardware configuration?

I'm also in contact with user "sonhospa". Hope we can find out why the frame grabbing doesn't work on some systems.

[TR56]

it's VISTA HOME PREMIUM 32 BIT,
I started a quest on vgaf.net if there is someone with vista and success in rendering.

Thomas

[scott967]

FWIW, this is what MediaInfo says about the video stream in the wmv file when using WMV9 AP codec:

Video
ID : 1
Format : VC-1
Format profile : AP@L4
Codec ID : WVC1
Codec ID/Hint : Microsoft
Description of the codec : Windows Media Video 9 Advanced Profile
Duration : 2mn 32s
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 9 554 Kbps
Width : 1 280 pixels
Height : 972 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 4:3
Frame rate : 25.000 fps
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Compression mode : Lossy
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.307
Stream size : 174 MiB (98%)
Language : English (US)

scott s.
.

[TR56]

Next step in rendering wmv files reached:

1) changing hardware settings in FS9 from 1440x900 / 32 Bits to 1440x900 / 16 Bits did not help

2) changing color depth in graphic adapter settings from Highest (32 Bit) to Medium (16 Bit) seem to be a workaround

Now my question to Matthias: what do you say theese changes? Do you know any requirements of color depth or resolution? Or should rendering work with true color (32 Bit)?

p.s. as I said before my graphic adapter is NVIDIA 8600GS M (Driver 285.62, now downgraded to 156.66)

Greetings (and Good Night)
Thomas

[noisy]

1) changing hardware settings in FS9 from 1440x900 / 32 Bits to 1440x900 / 16 Bits did not help

That makes sense, as the setting is only for fullscreen mode, but rendering is done in windowed mode.

2) changing color depth in graphic adapter settings from Highest (32 Bit) to Medium (16 Bit) seem to be a workaround

Now my question to Matthias: what do you say theese changes? Do you know any requirements of color depth or resolution? Or should rendering work with true color (32 Bit)?

I'm using 32 bit true color and rendering works here. But at least this gives some hint where to look for the problem.

p.s. as I said before my graphic adapter is NVIDIA 8600GS M (Driver 285.62, now downgraded to 156.66)

Mick (sonhospa ) also uses an NVIDIA graphics adapter, while I only have AMD/ATI here.

Mick, could you try switching to 16 bit color resolution? Would be insteresting if you can confirm Thomas' results.

[noisy]

Thomas, Mick,

I added some additional error checks to the rendering code. Please download and install the updated version and start rendering (with 32 bit color). You should now get an error message, after that exit FS and post the content of your FSRecorder.log file.

FS9 Version
FSX Version

[TR56]

Hi Matthias,
I'm sorry there is no error message
and content of FSRecorder.log is rather short:

FS Recorder for FS2004 Version 2.172 alpha (Built Feb 4 2012)
04.02.2012 15:40:05

Module Entry Point
FS2004 Version: 9.1.0.40901
Exit

I ran this this test 3 times with reinstall FSRECORDER too.

There are 2 temporary files before finishing FS:
FSRecorder.tmp1 and FSRecorder.tmp2 each with 0 Bytes length.

Greetings
Thomas

[noisy]

that means all the Windows GDI functions complete without returning an error, but do not copy the image.
This makes it harder to find the cause of the problem. I guess we can just do some experiments, can you contact me by email so I can directly send you modified versions for testing?

[sonhospa]

Hi Matthias and Thomas,

sorry for my late response. After finding Thomas' hints I reduced color depth as well (to 16 bit) and: Everything worked! So this really seems to be a clue...

After installing your new 2.172 Alpha I followed your suggestion, changing back to 32 bit, but didn't get any error message as well. Since I couldn't locate a log file in any of the usual directories, I can't supply that; I also didn't find any settings to start logging. Nevertheless, the resulting video contains only black frames, just like before. A funny effect (in my case?) which I forgot to mention is that, during recording, the main FS window (sky / environment) seems to be frozen, while the panels and instruments are moving just like they're supposed to. This seems to be connected to the bug: in 16bit mode everything seems to be normal.

Regards
Mick