Video Capture for Macs?

We have built video recording into WoW 2.2.0 on Mac, you can try it out on the PTR starting today. See the sticky thread on it.

By all means we want to hear your feedback on this feature and where we should go with it. I know there is some internal interest in bringing comparable functionality to the Windows client, maybe you can give us feedback on what you would want out of it that would make it your preferred choice for capturing.

To some extent we considered video capture on Windows a well solved problem due to the widespread usage of FRAPS, and we wanted to bring the Mac client some improvement in that area (it also happens to be a nice improvement for internal testers filing bug reports in a lot of situations). But if you feel we can do better or go farther than what is already prevalent on Windows, we can use that perspective.

Q u o t e:
If the video capture is built in, could there possibly be a way to add a feature where you can record with your ui on, but the end result hides the ui? this would improve the quality of pvp videos in some instances, although i guess sometimes it's nice to see the button setups and such.

This is already available in today's 2.2.0 build. We have a checkbox you can set to control whether any UI is included in the movie or not.

It helps that we draw all the game stuff before we draw any of the UI stuff each frame..

I'd be really happy if we could not put a platform war in this thread. If there is strong demand for the feature on the Windows client we will act accordingly.

One of the open questions there though is, what video codec software would be suitable ? Would this feature be appealing on Windows if QuickTime was required? (We leverage QuickTime on Mac because it is a default install and has some good codecs built in like H264 & MJPEG).

I know there is interest internally in bringing this feature to Windows (and the iTunes control too). There will inevitably be times when new features that are not core game functionality show up on one platform first (G-15 keyboard LCD support on Windows, iTunes UI & Movie-Capture on Mac) and there will be times where we bring them out simultaneously (Voice Chat).

Q u o t e:
Can you show the UI?

If you are referring to the UI for the movie capture panel on the Mac client, here is a link someone posted on another thread:

http://img65.imageshack.us/img65/9534/screenshot071307005202tq4.jpg

If you are asking "can the UI be captured in the movie", as you can see that choice is up to the user - you can have it included or not depending on the checkbox.

I was playing Starcraft II on OS X last night ? (evil grin)

The issues with porting the newer Mac client features back to Windows revolve around manpower and scheduling on the Windows development team and not anything having to do with policy or specific technical issues. The iTunes remote and the Movie Capture feature are both under consideration for porting back to Windows, so if we could just stay focused on articulating user desires and not platform flame wars here, might be a more useful thread for us.

Q u o t e:
All I can really think to suggest at the moment is support for more codecs -- is there any reason it can't support any codec currently available on the system's Quicktime install? (I mean, the default codec works great -- but people may want to use another for one reason or another.)

To some extent we're trying to avoid making the config menus extra long, if you could nominate 2-3 add'l codecs in the default QuickTime set that would make sense (or offer critiques for the ones listed) we'd love to hear it.

Maybe we could make a config.wtf setting for more direct control too.

No actually, those are good ideas, part of the motivation for developing this feature was to better support internal QA needs and debugging.

Q u o t e:


I'm curious as to why the dev team thought it was a prudent position to take in the first place. That you should offer the majority of your customers a $37 solution (you cited FRAPS specifically) while you're providing that same service for free for Mac users.

In all honesty, it's because we were receiving a steady stream of requests for this functionality on our Mac support forum, either from existing players on the Mac or new players moving to the Mac that missed the ability to use FRAPS, or were unsatisfied with third party apps. At the same time, we have some internal QA and debugging needs that are now easier for us to address with the built-in video recording mode (testers like to submit movies of visual bugs to development).

It should be made clear that we haven't stated any policy or firm decision about which features like this will be ported and/or when. It's entirely possible that the Windows team will be interested in putting similar tech into the Windows client, it just hasn't happened yet. A good example of this situation is G-15 LCD support, we have it on Windows but not on the Mac, because we don't have a way to bring it out there yet. It's important to be able to differentiate between "never" and "not now".

Q u o t e:
I would really like to see the Apple Intermediate Codec added. It is probably a more appropriate codec than Pixlet for most users, especially if you add support for real time compression on highend systems.

On a side note, is the video capture clamping the framerate a limitation of the current build, or a design decision based in part on the features use internally (ie, a desire to capture every rendered frame). On my system (Mac Pro, multiple hard disks, and a 30 inch display) it leaves me in the position of either striping several of my drives together to keep the data rate high enough, recording at 1/4 resolution, or dropping my frame rate from 100+ down to 15-30. I would like like to set the capture rate to 15 or 30 fps, and keep the frame rate capped at around something over 60.

While ideally I would like to separate those, knowing what the intent is sufficient to allow me to know if I need to repartition and stripe out my drives.

All good ideas. On my list.

It sounds like a fair number of people would find this feature useful on Windows, and we'll pass along that interest to the development team and producers to see if it's a viable proposal.

Q u o t e:

I mean seriously macs got dual core support again if I remember correctly, almost a year ago.

You might notice that when playing under Direct3D, WoW is already using dual processors. In fact that was one of the first things we noticed when profiling Mac WoW on OS X vs Windows on the same hardware, and was a significant motivation for implementing multi-threaded OpenGL - to offer competitive performance, comparable to what Direct3D is already doing internally. Put another way, there is no performance being left on the table on the Windows client - it was using multi-core all along.

So you can see, we really do try to turn unbalanced situations back into balanced ones; however sometimes it takes time and work.

IMO it isn't totally fair to put it that way because there wasn't parity to begin with.

One example of this would be the Logitech G-15 LCD keyboard which we support exclusively on Windows.

Ultimately the scheduling and/or decision to pursue porting this feature to the Windows client is not in my hands - it is up to the WoW development team who, as you can imagine, have many more features on their plate to weigh and prioritize. But your honest feedback is appreciated.

One of the challenges here is that this type of feature requires pretty specialized coding and is very platform dependent (if you want it to perform well), there isn't just a few lines we can change to port it across platforms. When there is more information to share on this topic, we'll make sure to put it up here.