What software do you use to record COH?

[KaizenSoze]

To be clear, I am not planning to violate the streaming TOS.

 

I want to record the difference between some weapon sets.

 

Convert them into a animated gif that I can upload to a forum post.

 

What software do you use when you record play sessions?

[ZorkNemesis]

It's fairly easy to use OBS to record gameplay (not just CoH either, it works for most everything).  No need to stream, the program is free and the quality is good.

[Greycat]

I have Fraps somewhere.

Alternately, /demorecord, /demostop, link the various ones together into one big demo... if that's not broken again.

[tidge]

As a peculiar aside: A few days ago I was fooling around with one of the GeForce utilities for screen records (unrelated to CoX) which is something I don't typically do... so I also ended up with a significant number of software updates. Generally, I take the position with video-related software and drivers to never update if things are working well, so I was non-plussed. Anyway, after the updates my desktop was behaving "badly" and I thought I was going to have to do a complete system rollback. Disabling the software package and trying to rollback just the video drivers left my system in a bit of a mess...

 

Anyway... it was not a problem with the video drivers and software per se, it was that the Nvidia GeForce software was in a sort of mode where it was ready to capture on a moments notice, and that what was causing the anomalies on the desktop. I ended up not having to do a system rollback, but I did waste time having to reinstall software and reconfigure my desktop display settings. It turned out that the settings I had turned on were STILL on... turning them back off was somewhat easy, but not exactly straightforward.

[Pouncy]

I would really like to know this. My system keeps getting into quite a jittery state.  I have rolled back a few times to fix it.  THen it starts again after a time. What, where, how do i stop the Nvida program from doing what you indicated?.

 

Thank you in advance,

Pouncy.

[DoctorDitko]

On 4/15/2021 at 7:23 AM, tidge said:

Nvidia GeForce software was in a sort of mode where it was ready to capture on a moments notice, and that what was causing the anomalies on the desktop

Oy, sorry to hear it. NV have the best hardware, but someone decided to monetize the drivers, and recently most of them are all about streaming, "intelligent" (read: run on their servers in the cloud) configuration optimizing (oh did we spy? Just looking to see if you have any games we partnered with)...

 

Disclaimer: I have been mad at NVidia since they bailed on the 3D api that ran lcd shutter glasses for stereoscopic effects. But this advice is still supporting NVidia hardware; it's just that you need to take their drivers to the vet and have them "fixed."

 

I strongly recommend a free utility found on the legendary and trusted Guru3d.com, it's called Nvidia Slimmer.  It will allow you to delete features you don't want from the NV driver package, optionally repackaging your own souvenir installer with just the features you want. Makes an excellent Mother's day gift for certain Mothers.

 

So, you go to NVidia's site, download the latest WHQL driver package (~600MB these days), then run NVSlimmer and point to your download when it asks.

 

Personally, I only install the driver itself and PhysX (Strange choice, I know, but there's this one game I really love that uses it...)

When I'm done it looks like this:

 

(Don't worry if it says it didn't recognize something, it just means the driver has some new features. NVSlimmer will still let you opt out of them, it'll just list them as unknown until the dev updates it.)

 

 

That's an awful lot of software to put pretty pictures on your monitor!

 

I use this to avoid the telemetry and such, but it is also helpful if the new drivers are beating up your machine.

 

In my experience, the results are worth the extra step! I'm on a capped, wireless dialup-equivalent connection (Thanks again, Verizon!), so "little" things like chatty telemetry have their effects magnified.* (Read: make me freeze up during Hami raids!)

Anyway, may this help your performance as well as your privacy!

-Doc

 

* Techie Coalition chat: I also turn off every protocol except IPV4 on my network interfaces. Amazing how NOT burning my limited bandwidth to test Quality of Service every half a second -- improves it!

 

 

Edited May 2, 2021 by DoctorDitko
OCD -- moving periods inside of parentheses, where they belong when the whole sentence is parenthetical. What part of OCD did you miss?

[tidge]

On 4/30/2021 at 3:07 PM, Pouncy said:

I would really like to know this. My system keeps getting into quite a jittery state.  I have rolled back a few times to fix it.  THen it starts again after a time. What, where, how do i stop the Nvida program from doing what you indicated?.

 

Thank you in advance,

Pouncy.

 

I suggest trying @DoctorDitko 's advice, because the extra bloat/overhead is probably not doing you any favors. Disabling the GeForce Experience completely (but keeping the drivers) would have almost certainly fixed the issue I introduced by myself.

 

From memory, I had to log into the NVidia (or was it GeForce) account and find a setting in there that I had (previously, intentionally) flipped. I think it was my account 'remembering' the setting, so rolling back the software itself didn't put things back. From my recollection, it was hiding behind a 'cog wheel'. I feel like it may have been the 'overlay' that was on, as well as one other setting.

 

I have an older rig, and I play older games without using co-op modes, screen captures or streaming... so I feel like I should have known better than to mess with software designed for a different class of user.

 

[UltraAlt]

On 4/30/2021 at 3:07 PM, Pouncy said:

I would really like to know this. My system keeps getting into quite a jittery state.  I have rolled back a few times to fix it.  THen it starts again after a time. What, where, how do i stop the Nvida program from doing what you indicated?.

 

Thank you in advance,

Pouncy.

 

I'm guessing you are not running Window 10.

Is that correct?

 

When Windows 10 came out, Windows 8.1 told me that my Toshiba laptop was good to go for the upgrade. The Toshiba website said it was good to go for the upgrade to Windows 10.

Over the course of the next several months, I re-installed Windows 8, upgraded to 8.1, and was told that the model of my Toshiba computer could upgrade to Windows 10 repeatedly - probably 3 or 4 times. Eventually, the Windows 10 updater and the Toshiba website said that the model of my Toshiba computer was not compatible with an upgrade to Windows 10.

Along the way, Windows 10 damaged my built in NVidia graphics card so that I could not play games that I was previously able to play. While Windows 10 was installed, it was apparently doing damage to the battery on my laptop as well - system kept giving me warnings that the battery was going bad. It would not shutdown properly. It would act like it was trying to upgrade for days at a time (slow interface, slow connection, so-so CPU speed, no progress prompts, so no way to know what the actual problem was). 

So that was the end of any upgrade to Windows 10 on my Toshiba laptop.

Toshiba pretty much kicked the ball down the road. Microsoft doesn't give a $#$% if it damages someone's hardware.

At around that same time that Window 10 wasn't letting me attempt the upgrade again due to incompatibility , NVidia started adding Vulkan that was also incompatible with my laptop graphics card. I can't remember if this was due to the age of my graphics card or due to the damage.

I'm running the Legacy NVidia driver on that Windows 8.1 Toshiba laptop at this point and set it up (somehow, I can't remember as it was years ago at this point) so that it can't look for updates ... it doesn't even fully function at any rate. I was never able to get it to play the games that failed to play after the upgrade to Windows 10 after reinstalling Windows 8.1 and not  upgrading to Windows 10.

Before the attempts of upgrade to Windows 10, I could easily run Planetside 2 on my Toshiba laptop computer. Now it won't even run City of Heroes. It's not just the NVidia driver. Obviously, if the laptop could run Planetside 2, it could easily have handled City of Heroes. In fact, I loaded it and it was running it and crashed out with an error and wouldn't let me run it again on the laptop. 

Windows 10 installation damaged my graphics card somehow. It was also affecting my laptop's battery health. I have no idea what else it was doing to cause negative impact to my system (fan speeds, voltage changes, who knows?). Was it an issue with hardware specs that Toshiba provided to Microsoft? I have no idea. 

 

So, yeah, that's why I'm asking if you are running Windows 10.

[UltraAlt]

On 4/15/2021 at 7:23 AM, tidge said:

it was that the Nvidia GeForce software was in a sort of mode where it was ready to capture on a moments notice

 

Are you talking about the mode where it is actually always recording the last "set length of time" (I think the default is set at 5 minutes) versus starting to record when you tell it to start recording?

Edited May 8, 2021 by UltraAlt

[tidge]

2 hours ago, UltraAlt said:

 

Are you talking about the mode where it is actually always recording the last "set length of time" (I think the default is set at 5 minutes) versus starting to record when you tell it to start recording?

 

Frankly: I turned aware from the software so I can't offer details on what it was doing. I had intended to use a mode where I would pick when it started to record. My suspicion is that the software was always passing some small (a few seconds?) duration of the displayed screen through some sort of buffer in anticipation of the user asking it to begin recording. While the software was running, what was finally being displayed on the screen was IMO "obviously" not the immediate video output I expected (or had experienced) prior to activating that part of the code.

 

The effects it introduced was a a "delay" (almost to the point of hysteresis, but not quite) in simply moving icons/windows on the desktop, and certain closed windows kept an "afterimage" on the screen. Task Manager would no longer show the programs as running, but the last images from them would be preserved. The first effect was highly annoying, but I can imagine that per the software implementation it was "working as expected". The second effect was a clear software defect. In either case, the program did not meet the needs of my intended use and significantly affected my quality of life. I'm not going back to it, and the experience was painful enough that I'm simply relieved to have recovered from the experience; I have no intention of going back to it... even to help better understand what happened.

[Pouncy]

I am running

3 hours ago, UltraAlt said:

So, yeah, that's why I'm asking if you are running Windows 10.

 

YEs i am running Windows 10 that came installed on my Asus Q534UXK laptop. I rolled back my PC a couple times and the trouble with the game and the PC being really slow went away.  A while ago I let Gforce upgrade. since the trouble didn't immediately start i did not associate that with any recording of the game.  I use OBS for that. But that also becomes horrible when game is running.  Now that old restore has been over written and thats a true bummer.

I have an AOMEI back up but wow W10 has become a horrible pain to restore.  The factory restore is not viable now with the new upgrade just not allowing its use.

Hopefully I can get this smoothed out and recording game that is more a video than a slide show.

[tidge]

I feel for you on the subject of Windows 10 rollbacks/restores. My son's W10 laptop ended up in a mode where it required a complete restoration and it was not a pleasant experience. Windows did allow for a rather 'complete' archiving of all his data, and the post-mortem did not leave any clues for any of the sort of things that could be assigned blame (e.g. external threat actors, hardware failures).

 

As I wrote earlier: I really am not interested in understanding my own specific circumstances (since I think I recovered from the wound and I never plan to go anywhere near that again). I definitely got the sense that the the NVidia/GeForce software was brute-forcing (or should I say, "naively handling") elements of display in a manner that it shouldn't have. After all, I expect the Video Card to be doing 100% of "the work" as far as presenting the information on my screen, but when that application was running there was a clear disconnect between simple IO commands from the keyboard/mouse (e.g. stuttering and delay) as well as CPU (window processes killed/stopped but the window still displayed) and the video card (what I see on the monitor screen).

 

I don't know enough about the raw basics of how a video card translates the graphical requirements for things like "move an icon", "close a window", or "redraw a screen"... but I got the sense that the software as implemented didn't have a full understanding of these basics either. I might have had some basic idea back in the mid 1980s, but this is an aspect of PC design and architecture that blessedly hasn't required much (if any) deep technical expertise to enjoy.

[UltraAlt]

On 5/8/2021 at 9:42 AM, tidge said:

My suspicion is that the software was always passing some small (a few seconds?) duration of the displayed screen through some sort of buffer in anticipation of the user asking it to begin recording

 

Like I said, the instant replay is set up to record 5 minutes (I'm pretty sure that is correct) by default, so, if you don't go in and turn the instant replay stuff off (not sure if that is the correct term and being lazy to switch to my ADMIN account and ferret it out), it is constantly recording the last 5 minutes in a loop of storage, so at any point after you manage to do something epic, you can push the button and the last 5 minutes (or more or less depending up on if you changed the settings) will automatically be saved as a file. So that is taking up CPU, GPU, and hard drive access time while it is running.

I do use Nvidia Experience and I have used it to capture gameplay and screenshots (it's my default for screenshots at this point.)

It will record any microphone you have on if you don't mute it. So you can narrate or what not with it, or shut it off to stop ambient room noises or background sounds from filtering in over the gameplay footage.

I did to my best to shutdown or maximally nerf the instant reply storage. I can't remember which I achieved. 

 

* If you don't use Geforce Experience for video or picture capture I would turn it off that feature :: youtube video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7ej-SBLpzY

Edited May 10, 2021 by UltraAlt

[UltraAlt]

On 5/8/2021 at 10:23 AM, Pouncy said:

I am running

 

YEs i am running Windows 10 that came installed on my Asus Q534UXK laptop. I rolled back my PC a couple times and the trouble with the game and the PC being really slow went away.  A while ago I let Gforce upgrade. since the trouble didn't immediately start i did not associate that with any recording of the game.  I use OBS for that. But that also becomes horrible when game is running.  Now that old restore has been over written and thats a true bummer.

I have an AOMEI back up but wow W10 has become a horrible pain to restore.  The factory restore is not viable now with the new upgrade just not allowing its use.

Hopefully I can get this smoothed out and recording game that is more a video than a slide show.

 

If you don't use Geforce Experience for video or picture capture I would turn it off that feature :: youtube video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7ej-SBLpzY