Demos again

[Dr Sadako]

Is there a program (like mediaplayer) to run the movies outside cs/hl? Could do you convert them to e.g. mpg?

[OldBloke]

Probably - but then they wouldn't be interactive.

[Dr Sadako]

Here is one.

http://www.planetquake3.net/seismovision/

[OldBloke]

Isn't that just another demo player like Geekboys?

[Dr Sadako]

Isn't that just another demo player like Geekboys?

Looks that way ... if I am lucky it will not crash my PC as Geekplayer does.  

[sheepy]

there are ways of converting demos so that they are .mpg files, i viewd some videos a while ago, i think i got them from oldie. they were cool.

[A Twig]

Yes, Silly did a whole loada stuff on this not so long ago. I think he eventualy found a proggie, ask him! =)

[suicidal_monkey]

I made one of those videos. I have nowhere to host it (~18Mb) but can dcc it in irc or something if you're interested. It's in wmv format because at the time windows movie maker was the only way I had of adding audio to my avi.

The process of converting demo to avi/mpeg/whatever isnt done in only one step unfortunately. (Step 3 isnt exactly necessary, especially with faster pc's but can help avoid some jitters)

• record your demo files and make sure you have lots of space on your HDD!
• open up halflife and go to the console
• timedemo demoname
  
• let the demo play through so that it's loaded into memory and then
• playdemo demoname for first person demos or viewdemo demoname for hltv ones
  
• when the demo gets to the part you want to make into a movie type startmovie moviename where fps indicated how many frames per second you want it to do (this never quite works as I expect it to and is an optional switch.)
  
• the demo will tick by a lot slower now as it outputs all the frames
• once the bit you want to keep is over type endmovie
  
• now you will have 100's of .bmp screenshots in your halflive folder named "moviename_0000.bmp" and you need a movie compiler to change those into an avi.
Bear in mind that the bmp files require a LOT of space. 10 seconds of movie at 30fps will create 300 bmp files. A 1024x768 bmp file is approx 2.25Mb so that requires about 700Mb of hdd space. When converting to a movie use whatever processing you like. I convert all the 1024 bmp files into 640x480 or 320x240 jpeg's using irfanview batch conversion and then usually the mpeg v4.2 codec when creating my avi files.

www.doom9.org has loads of video editing tools. virtualdub is my favourite editor. Used to have something else for the jpeg sequence --> avi though but I cant remember what it was called