Is there a way to convert Winamp visualizations into a MP4 video

I have played with Winamp visualizations for years and have designed
hundreds of them. I'd like to share some of them as MP4 videos. The idea
is to save the song I'm playing along with the visualization as a video,
similar to the videos on youtube.

Is there anyway to save the visualization as well as the music into a
video format? If there is some softwar made for this purpose, I didnt
find it using google.

I'd be doing this using Win XP-Pro SP3.

On Tue, 01 Mar 2016 06:37:35 -0600, wrote in


I have played with Winamp visualizations for years and have designed
hundreds of them. I'd like to share some of them as MP4 videos. The idea
is to save the song I'm playing along with the visualization as a video,
similar to the videos on youtube.

Is there anyway to save the visualization as well as the music into a
video format? If there is some softwar made for this purpose, I didnt
find it using google.

I'd be doing this using Win XP-Pro SP3.

This is written for Win7, but will probably be applicable to WinXPpro
http://www.wikihow.com/Record-Screen...soft-Windows-7
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wrote:
I have played with Winamp visualizations for years and have designed
hundreds of them. I'd like to share some of them as MP4 videos. The idea
is to save the song I'm playing along with the visualization as a video,
similar to the videos on youtube.

Is there anyway to save the visualization as well as the music into a
video format? If there is some softwar made for this purpose, I didnt
find it using google.

I'd be doing this using Win XP-Pro SP3.


You can do screen capture in software or with
a hardware card.

Doing it in software, requires a "mighty machine". In
that, the compression of the data needs CPU power.

With a hardware card, you want a card with a
decent compressor onboard. Or, you want a
card with decent I/O (PCI Express x4 connector
minimum), plus a disk array that can eat data at
a high rate. In modern times, a single SATA III
SSD with 500MB/sec I/O may suffice for raw *unencoded"
capture.

For software screen capture, I've used FFMPEG.

First, you ask FFMPEG to tell you the "name" of your sound
system. You'd be surprised how the name is registered on the
system, so this step is important. This audio device happens
to have a conventional name, but check this anyway.

ffmpeg -list_devices true -f dshow -i dummy

Once you know the name of the audio, you can ask how many channels
it has. This is pointless, and the command is only included for fun.
You don't need to do this, and, it might not work anyway.

ffmpeg -f dshow -list_options true -i audio="SoundMAX HD Audio"

Now, it's time to do some video capture, complete with sound.
Here, I'm capturing just a 720x480 chunk of the screen. You can
remove all the "offset junk" and capture the whole screen if you want.
The intention here, is to reduce the amount of CPU needed. You can
drop the framerate to 30 if you want, for further savings.

ffmpeg -offset_x 0 -offset_y 480 -video_size 720x480 -framerate 60
-f gdigrab -i desktop -f dshow -sample_rate 44100 -i audio="SoundMAX HD Audio"
-vcodec mjpeg -acodec pcm_s16le out.avi

Now, what are the advantages of mjpeg as a codec ?

1) Multi-threading. One MJPEG compressor can run per CPU core.
The number of threads can be tuned, so FFMPEG doesn't use up
all the GPU.
2) Disadvantage - mathematical "ringing" on the edge of sharp
objects, causes visual artifacts. One of the reasons I like
RAW capture methods (but those need fast storage devices).

In any case, that command gives you a starting point for your
own capture.

Note that, many software capture method are "asynchronous" to the
screen. They access some double-buffer and snapshot the screen there.
If you capture a 30FPS screen at 60FPS, you expect frames to be
duplicated, but in a less than predictable way (due to clock rate
differences). A hardware capture card, on the other hand, triggers
off VSYNC, and captures perfect copies of the screen. Only the
scummy compressors hold back hardware cards. One moderately
expensive product (with nice passthru video connectors) uses
an MJPEG compressor built in an FPGA. Which is certainly easy for
the hardware designer, but the MJPEG is not my idea of the best
possible output solution.

For a Windows build of FFMPEG, select a "static" build. If your
OS is 32 bit, you want the 32-bit static build. The
executable may be 10MB for the ffmpeg.exe, but the program
is complete and portable that way (all the DLLs are inside the
EXE). I keep mine in C:\FFMPEG\bin.

http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/

FFMPEG can also do all the post processing, such as converting the
output later into MP4 or whatever you want. There are many web
pages with FFMPEG sample commands.

Note that, on OSes like Win8 or Win10, FFMPEG is prevented from
capturing above 30FPS. Win7 works well, and allows unlimited
async capture rates. My record so far is 240FPS (perfectly
pointless), and the software begins to show its sampling rate
limitations when you do silly things like that. The video is
basically unusable at 240FPS, garbage. However, with choices
of -framerate 60 or -framerate 30, you're likely to
get something you can use or experiment with.

Tools like CamStudio (adware inside), are limited to 4GB captures
due to not having implemented AVI2 properly. Perfectly fine if you
use a high-compression codec and the output movie is less than
4GB in size. But no good if you use a lossless codec and the
movie is huge. CamStudio is very convenient, which is the main
attraction to using it. I have an earlier version, adware-free.

Wikipedia articles on products like CamStudio, identify the adware
for you, warning you in advance why your AV or whatever, is alarmed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camstudio

*******

Additional pointers (from a Dec.20, 2016 post, post not in Google...)

http://www.videohelp.com/software/se...screen-capture

On the videohelp page, you'll notice the IceCream
capture program is listed. The download is pretty large,
but inside, it's the bloat of various open source
libraries that accounts for the size. Unfortunately,
I didn't have the guts to install it. It's very
difficult to determine what their business model
is. The web page makes it look free (and we all know
that serious developers don't do this stuff for nothing).
One web page hinted at a free and a Pro version, yet
I couldn't find a price or feature comparison anywhere.
The videohelp site claims that product is a "trial".
Which means it could stop working after a while.
The company headquarters is in Cyprus.

http://icecreamapps.com/download/scr...rder_setup.exe

When unpacked with WINE, this is what the file set looks like.
It uses Qt5 and LibAV, and one of the huge file components
handles localization (different languages for the interface).

Icecream Screen Recorder:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 10016768 Jul 2 09:23 avcodec-56.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 243200 Jul 2 09:24 avdevice-56.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 1330688 Jul 2 09:24 avfilter-5.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 1985536 Jul 2 09:24 avformat-56.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 637952 Jul 2 08:01 avutil-54.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 138240 Aug 8 2014 CrashRpt1403.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 8214 Oct 13 2013 crashrpt_lang.ini
-rw-rw-r-- 1 104960 Aug 8 2014 CrashRptProbe1403.dll
-rwxrwxr-x 1 945152 Aug 8 2014 CrashSender1403.exe
-rw-rw-r-- 1 1256080 Jul 16 2014 dbghelp.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 23507968 Jan 15 2014 icudt52.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 1798656 Jan 15 2014 icuin52.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 1304064 Jan 15 2014 icuuc52.dll
drwxrwxr-x 2 4096 Dec 2 11:31 imageformats
-rw-rw-r-- 1 421200 Jun 10 2011 msvcp100.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 773968 Jun 10 2011 msvcr100.dll
drwxrwxr-x 2 4096 Dec 2 11:31 platforms
-rw-rw-r-- 1 4111872 Nov 16 2014 Qt5Core.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 4342272 May 15 2014 Qt5Gui.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 849408 May 15 2014 Qt5Network.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 4370944 May 15 2014 Qt5Widgets.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 190976 May 15 2014 Qt5WinExtras.dll
-rwxrwxr-x 1 116736 Jun 30 21:44 quickshot.exe
-rwxrwxr-x 1 1841152 Aug 20 09:02 recorder.exe
-rw-rw-r-- 1 256512 Jul 2 09:22 swresample-1.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 691712 Jul 2 08:01 swscale-3.dll
drwxrwxr-x 2 4096 Dec 2 11:31 translations
-rw-rw-r-- 1 25573 Dec 2 11:31 unins000.dat
-rwxrwxr-x 1 1559753 Dec 2 11:31 unins000.exe

Icecream Screen Recorder/imageformats:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 32256 May 15 2014 qdds.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 21504 May 15 2014 qgif.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 27648 May 15 2014 qicns.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 20992 May 15 2014 qico.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 381952 May 15 2014 qjp2.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 204800 May 15 2014 qjpeg.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 218112 May 15 2014 qmng.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 15872 May 15 2014 qsvg.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 15360 May 15 2014 qtga.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 307712 May 15 2014 qtiff.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 14848 May 15 2014 qwbmp.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 252928 May 15 2014 qwebp.dll

Icecream Screen Recorder/platforms:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 261336 Aug 13 14:47 promo.bmp
-rw-rw-r-- 1 24576 May 15 2014 qminimal.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 432640 May 15 2014 qoffscreen.dll
-rw-rw-r-- 1 875008 May 15 2014 qwindows.dll

Icecream Screen Recorder/translations:
....
-rw-rw-r-- 1 23362 Aug 7 12:49 lang_en.qm

I didn't see anything in the list that screams
"Adware", and the purpose of showing that
list, is to show how a screen capture program
needs a 35MB download. The CamStudio code
is quite a bit smaller.

Even "CrashRpt1403" is open source and goes by
that name on the web. So you can track that
one down too.

The Icecream developers still have to do some work, as
they have to command avcodec and friends to do
the capture. (This would be the same as doing it
with FFMPEG roughly.)

You can also do screen capture with VLC. But I don't
know what versions support this.

http://www.wikihow.com/Screen-Capture-to-File-Using-VLC

Many of these tools, bootstrap off FFMPEG or lib avcodec,
and hence, if you see issues during capture, the same
issues could happen with more than one product. Camstudio
on the other hand (at the moment), doesn't tap into
other libraries. So its screwups, are of its own making.

Have fun,
Paul