EpicRewind, a new video capture tool which uses a RAM RollingBuffer for "instant-replay" functionality

[Zugdud]

Greetings all,

I haven't done much multi-boxing recently but I wanted to let you all know about a video capture tool I've been working on called EpicRewind, I think some of you may find it interesting.

EpicRewind is video capture software that has a key differentiating feature: RAM RollingBuffer mode. This works like an on-demand instant-replay: a game is hooked and the video is continuously buffered in system RAM, when something cool happens the user can save the buffer contents with the press of a hotkey. So rather than saving video from your entire gaming session you can just save the good stuff after it actually happens. In addition, EpicRewind provides some nice performance benefits over traditional capture software: video processing, encoding and writing to disk only happen when you choose to save a video clip. During video buffering, the contents of the framebuffer are just being copied to system memory X times per second based your specified capture FPS. There is also a region capture mode which can be used to capture video from a specified portion of the desktop and could include multiple game windows.

You can find more information about EpicRewind here on our website along with some demonstration videos:

http://epicrewind.com

We are at the point now where we have a usable beta build and are looking for more folks to try it out. If this sounds interesting to you feel free to send me a PM and I’ll get you signed up, alternatively you can also email me at:

contact@epicrewind.com

If you really like the idea, we've just launched a Kickstarter for the project here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...399/epicrewind

Anyway, thanks for reading!

Zugdud

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Interesting. For folks with lots of RAM that don't like to record the entire gaming session but do like to save those "OMG DID YOU SEE THAT?" moments, could be pretty neat.

[Zugdud]

Thanks!

Agreed, back when I was playing WoW most of the interesting stuff that was worth sharing tended to happen at the most unexpected times. I always found it inconvenient to pre-plan a gaming video, I just wanted to focus on playing the game. Sometimes pre-planning a video makes perfect sense such as recording a dungeon run, but most of the time I just wanted an easy to save those "epic" (sorry, couldn't help myself...) moments after they happened.

For folks without much RAM to spare you can still buffer a lot of frames if you don't mind lower quality output video. With just a 256Mb buffer size a game played at 1920x1080 using the 1/4 frame re-sizer will produce output videos @ 420x270 with 30 seconds of video being buffered. The output videos won't be HD quality, but still a decent resolution for sharing on the net.

Cheers

[MiRai]

I agree that this looks like a nice tool, but as Ugh said, you'll most likely want a nice chunk of RAM available so that you can record at the resolution that you normally would any other day of the week. High-def resolutions like 720 and 1080 are standard for broadcast on YouTube and other streaming sites these day, not to mention, monitors that are capable of resolutions greater than 1920x1080 are becoming much more accessible to the public both in price and availability. A video with a resolution of 420x270 is just above the bare minimum of what YouTube will accept (240p) and that's not going to cut it when using fullscreen mode and it's stretched across a 1080, 1200, 1440, or 1600 display -- I can't imagine anyone would want to watch a video in that resolution, let alone understand what is happening in a video at that resolution.

I will also agree that it isn't always feasible to plan ahead and record endless hours of footage and hope you get something good (because it sucks to sift through it all afterwards), but 30 seconds is rarely enough time. It might be enough time in a game like a first person shooter where you can quickly get a fancy trick shot off or something like that, but let's say you're multiboxing on a PvP server and a semi-large battle happens to break out and drag on for a bit, you're most likely going to want more than 30 seconds available to you; but you could also argue that anyone running this program should already have their main capture program like FRAPS or whatever running in the background ready to pick up the slack of recording when the time is right.

TL;DR - I'd recommend lots of RAM when using a program like this so that you can record at mainstream high-def resolutions for at least a minute or two.

[Baltyre]

For encoding, why choose xvid over h264 ?

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Because xvid doesn't have draconian licensing issues?

[Zugdud]

Yeah, unfortunately as Ughmahedhurtz mentioned there are licensing issues preventing us from easily leveraging any H.264 encoders.

There is a GPL H.264 implementation called x264 which is quite popular and free for end users to download and install, the problem is that we would need to tie into FFmpeg for some processing functions (we use FFmpeg for most of the video processing functions). FFmpeg actually already has really nice support available for x264 unfortunately building FFmpeg with these features makes the resulting binary GPL v3.0 conforming and therefore not distributable with our tool (the custom build we include is LGPL v2.1 conforming).

One possible workaround here is that I could just create another FFmpeg build (GPL v3.0) with x264 support and make it available as an optional download on the website. Not an ideal solution, but one possibility

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Ya know, I've been playing Far Cry 3 this week and there have been a few times when I'd have loved to have this software to save some of my cooler long-range weapon usage.

[Baltyre]

Maybe you can just activate x264 if a specified dll is in the same directory ?
By the way, when we activate the "rewind" button, can we postpone encoding to not ruin cpu perf during a game ?

[Zugdud]

Hey thanks Ugh, that's good to hear!

Maybe you can just activate x264 if a specified dll is in the same directory ?
By the way, when we activate the "rewind" button, can we postpone encoding to not ruin cpu perf during a game ?

Yeah there is an option in the optional settings menu tab called "Delay Post Processing". With this enabled, the buffer contents are simply written to disk and no processing/encoding will happen. Currently the processing of this data is started automatically when you exit the hooked game, however this is proving to be unreliable, so we are changing this batch processing of dumped buffers to be manually controllable via a new menu button.