Chapter 65: Recording Videos & Sound

VisualBoyAdvance has two great features that separate it even more from most emulators. It can record both video and sound (even though video has a desync problem which will be covered in the next chapter). You can find these amazing features near the bottom of the “Tools” menu in VBA.

If you go to the ‘record’ tab and hit ‘start sound recording’, you’ll be prompted to type in the name for a .WAV file, which is an uncompressed file with recorded sound that can be played by a program like Windows Media Player. They tend to be big though, so watch out.

When you’re done recording the sound, you go back to the ‘record’ tab and hit ‘stop sound recording’, and then enjoy your file. Bam.

In a similar manner, one can record an AVI file, which is an uncompressed video file. Like the WAV, it tends to be huge, except that since it’s video and contains graphics, it will be even larger than you might imagine. Depending on how long the video is, it can definitely get over 100MB as an AVI. No worries, though, I’ll cover how to save space and make uploading such a huge file quicker in the next chapter.

The only difference between this and sound is that you have to select a basic video compression.

“Full Frames (Uncompressed)” is completely uncompressed. All the other options will compress the files, but with different features and quality. So I kinda lied about AVI’s not being compressed, it’s just that they aren’t compressed nearly as well as MP4’s… XP.

I typically use “Microsoft Video 1” as it doesn’t really change the quality of the video but gets the job done, and it shouldn’t lag like “Full Frames” does (that records every single frame—it’ll be huge and unless your computer is super uber, it’ll be slow). Other codecs may also be installed into the system due to installation of other programs (or you’re just an extremely competent video renderer), but those aren’t necessary or anything.

Finally, you can record a “movie”, which is not for sharing with others. A movie is a clip of the game that you can play (using the play tab) which shows you part of the game that you played. If you ever use the movie feature, savestate before, then do it.

As you can see, none of that is really any hard or anything, which is why it’s more convenient (and results in better quality!) to use VBA to record stuff from your hack than it is an external program!

Chapter 66: Fixing the Desync with VirtualDubMod & Video Rendering

In the last chapter, I mentioned a desync… an audio desync, to be exact. The video frame rate and audio frame rate don’t match up. As a result, the audio starts to lag behind, and after a couple of minutes, when the audio and video don’t match up, it can get really bad.

This is solved by a program called VirtualDubMod. The program and the method to fix the desync were introduced to me by Shadow of Chaos, who was introduced to it by some youtube video, IIRC.

Download and install virtual dub mod (I won’t tell you how though, it’s just installing a program. >_>). Load it up and hit Ctrl+O (or file->open video file) and load the AVI that VBA produced.

Now, since I’m really nice, I created a file that loads settings that automatically fix the frame rate issue and set the program to quickly but efficiently recompress the AVI. You can download it below.

http://www.feshrine.net/hacking/downloads/GBASettings.vcf

Hit ctrl+L or file-> load processing settings and load the file I just linked to above (make sure you do that AFTER the video is loaded, though). Then hit “save as” under the file menu and save the AVI again. It’ll take a little bit to render, but once it’s done, you may be done for good, as the file may be small enough that you can just upload it as it is and be happy.

If you aren’t happy, you can try recompressing it, while also making it youtube friendly, with a program called Free Zune Converter (yes it’s free). Download that and extract it or whatever and when you open it, you should see this:

Those are the settings I have, which youtube doesn’t complain about. You can change the resolution which will affect the various quality settings youtube and possibly other sites offer. 1280x720 is for 720p [HD], 1920x1080 is for 1080p [HD], and the one I have hightlighted, 640x480, is for HQ (480p). Granted, if you save it as an HD file, the game will not only be stretched and kinda appear as awesome HD (GBA was never meant for HD resolution though XD), but the file will be large, so keep that in mind.

You can mess with some of the other settings if you want, but once I pick the resolution and the output format (which is always the same for me), I’m done, which means I just drag my videos onto the program and hit “convert”, and it’ll create a new MP4 file from the AVI file I got from VirtualDubMod which I got from VBA.

All of this may seem like a long process, but it’s necessary for an awesome video, and once you learn how to do it, the actual work isn’t long—you just have to wait for the videos to render, and everything else pretty much takes 5 minutes.

But yes, that’s the basics of rendering videos. With that, there’s no excuse for crappy youtube videos of hacks (unless the hacks are crappy, but that’s what the REST of this tutorial is for!).