GSVideo MovieMaker fails silently; no video file saved to disk

scmurray

GSVideo MovieMaker fails silently; no video file saved to disk

in Contributed Library Questions • 2 years ago

GSVideo's DrawingMovie examples works on my machine (OS X 10.6.8, Processing 1.5.1). I've copied and pasted the code from the example exactly into my own sketch. Yet, in my sketch, no video recording file is generated. All seems well, no errors, and the println() statements of queued/dropped frames appear, so it seems the MovieMaker object has been instantiated and is running, yet after I exit the sketch, there is no "video.ogg" file in the sketch folder. I am using the default renderer (not sure what it is in 1.5.1).

Any ideas why this would fail silently?

Replies(10)

andres

Re: GSVideo MovieMaker fails silently; no video file saved to disk

2 years ago

If the included example works, then there is probably something missing in your sketch. Did you remember to call the finish() method to make sure that the video file is properly closed? (however, I just tried the DrawingMovie example without the finish() call and still generates the ogg file).

I think it would be easier to spot the problem if you post the sketch.

jobleonard

Re: GSVideo MovieMaker fails silently; no video file saved to disk

2 years ago

Assuming it's not a problem with the library but with the code, it could be all kinds of stuff. It's probably something really dumb too (in the sense that it's such a small mistake it's nigh impossible to find). For example:

mm = new GSMovieMaker(this, width, height, "drawing.ogg", GSMovieMaker.THEORA, GSMovieMaker.MEDIUM, fps);

See the "this"? It's meant to pass a reference to the processing sketch. However if you pasted the code to the inside of a class, it passed a reference to the class, so you should either first pass the reference to the sketch to the class, then pass it on to the moviemaker object, or make a global PApplet variable referencing the sketch (say, thisSketch) and pass that instead.

Yes, this example has given me headaches before :P.

scmurray

Re: GSVideo MovieMaker fails silently; no video file saved to disk

2 years ago

Thanks, guys! Yes, I, too, am worried that it's something really tiny and simple that I've overlooked, but I just went through all the code, line by line, and everything that's in the example code is also in my sketch, including key bits like:

mm instantiation
mm.start()
updatePixels
mm.addFrame()
mm.finish()

I would post the code, but it's a big project with several classes across five .pde files, and therefore not easy to paste into the forum here.

That said, I just noticed something strange with the queued and dropped frames. When I run the example sketch, I always see only one queued frame, and always zero dropped frames:

Number of queued frames : 1
Number of dropped frames: 0
Number of queued frames : 1
Number of dropped frames: 0

However, with my sketch, the number of queued frames increases until it hits the max (50), at which point the dropped frames starts increasing, too:

GSVideo version: 0.9
Number of queued frames : 1
Number of dropped frames: 0
Number of queued frames : 2
Number of dropped frames: 0
Number of queued frames : 3
Number of dropped frames: 0
Number of queued frames : 4
Number of dropped frames: 0
Number of queued frames : 5
Number of dropped frames: 0
...
Number of queued frames : 47
Number of dropped frames: 0
Number of queued frames : 48
Number of dropped frames: 0
Number of queued frames : 49
Number of dropped frames: 0
Number of queued frames : 49
Number of dropped frames: 1
Number of queued frames : 49
Number of dropped frames: 2
Number of queued frames : 49
Number of dropped frames: 3
...
Number of queued frames : 49
Number of dropped frames: 47
Number of queued frames : 49
Number of dropped frames: 48
Number of queued frames : 49
Number of dropped frames: 49
Number of queued frames : 49
Number of dropped frames: 50
Number of queued frames : 49
Number of dropped frames: 51
Number of queued frames : 49
Number of dropped frames: 52
Number of queued frames : 49
Number of dropped frames: 53
Number of queued frames : 49
Number of dropped frames: 54
Number of queued frames : 49
Number of dropped frames: 55
Number of queued frames : 49
Number of dropped frames: 56
Number of queued frames : 49
Number of dropped frames: 57

This goes on for as long as I let the sketch run.

So it looks like all frames are being queued, but never processed/encoded, so eventually they get dropped. That would explain why no .ogg file is being created (since there are zero frames to put in it!), but why wouldn't any frames be processed?

andres

Re: Re: GSVideo MovieMaker fails silently; no video file saved to disk

2 years ago

What are the queue sizes you are using in the setQueueSize() call?

jobleonard

Re: GSVideo MovieMaker fails silently; no video file saved to disk

2 years ago

If the sketch is only meant to encode the result a movie anyway (so a low fps isn't an issue during rendering), you could wrap the whole rendering/adding to the encoder in this if block:

void draw(){
if (mm.getQueuedFrames() == 0){
//render the stuff and add it to the frame
}
}

No idea if this is going to help with the current problem, but it's good practice regardless.

scmurray

Re: GSVideo MovieMaker fails silently; no video file saved to disk

2 years ago

andres: I'm using 50 and 10, same as in the example, like so: mm.setQueueSize(50, 10);

jobleonard: Thanks! Interesting idea. I tried this, but it just hung on the first frame. It seems the number of queued frames never drops down to zero (as though the queued frames are never actually being processed and saved out to disk).

jobleonard

Re: GSVideo MovieMaker fails silently; no video file saved to disk

2 years ago

Uhm... could that mean there's a problem with threading going on? I don't really know much about that. Are you running Sun Java? And what renderer are you using? I recall that there where some bugs when using P2D with the open source versions of the JDK.

scmurray

Re: GSVideo MovieMaker fails silently; no video file saved to disk

2 years ago

I'm using the default renderer for 1.5.1 (i.e., no renderer specified).

How would I tell what Java I'm running? I'm using whatever Apple installed for me.

andres

Re: GSVideo MovieMaker fails silently; no video file saved to disk

2 years ago

Be careful with the resolutions you use for move recording. I think the ogg encoder doesn't support well resolutions over 640x480.

scmurray

Re: GSVideo MovieMaker fails silently; no video file saved to disk

2 years ago

I still haven't been able to get this working, and I've tried many different combinations of file formats and codecs, also at low resolutions (640x480 or 400x300). I'm giving up on this for now, and will use saveFrame to generate TGA stills for non-realtime output.

Looking forward to the updated MovieMaker in Processing 2.0! :-)

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