A video encoding with a restart is split into separate files

[Matte27]

[clementgallet]

This is an expected behavior and won't be changed. The encoding is done by the game, so when it exits, the connection to ffmpeg is closed, so is the encode file. And I'm guessing resuming an encode is not possible for the majority of codecs.

[vadosnaprimer]

It's trivial to splice them in post-production.

[Matte27]

Trivial or not, it still takes time to do that. Having it done in the tas tool would make it a lot simpler and faster.

[vadosnaprimer]

How much time does it take exactly?

[Matte27]

I don't know because I haven't done it but I'm sure is a non-trivial amount. Even if I did I don't think it would be less than say 10s, and when I am testing new stuff and looking at the recordings those seconds add up.

[vadosnaprimer]

@clementgallet what's the current naming convention for dump segments?

[clementgallet]

If the name of the file is video.avi, then the first segment is video.avi, the second one is video_1.avi, third is video_2.avi. It splits on the last . character to add the segment number.

[vadosnaprimer]

@Matte27 see how long this takes (install mkvtoolnix, change "avi" to whatever video format you dump libtas videos in)

ls -v *.avi | xargs | { read f; mkvmerge -o output.mkv ${f// / + }; }

[Matte27]

Do you think all TASers will figure out quickly how to do this? Many of whom aren't even familiar with linux. I think not.

[vadosnaprimer]

At first your point against doing this manually was that it's slow. Now you're refusing to even test it and switch to a new argument that holds no water either. Putting this command right into libTAS documentation and readme costs zero effort and makes it instantly obvious for everyone who cares enough to read.

[nlburgin]

Do you think all TASers will figure out quickly how to do this? Many of whom aren't even familiar with linux. I think not.

Encoding being dead-easy was never a hard requirement anyway. A lot of TAS tools don't even have FFMPEG integration at all, but will only dump a massive raw avi that you have to re-encode yourself. At least this takes care of that for you.

And, as has just been pointed out, putting the relevant command right in the documentation would mean they still wouldn't really have to "figure it out" themselves anyway. That command is copy-pasteable and can be re-used as-is as long as you don't have any other avi files in the target folder.

...though on the other hand, with the command being so simple, I'm actually wondering why libtas couldn't just run it automatically at the end of the encoding. 🤔

It wouldn't have to actually avoid splitting, just offer an option to automatically merge the dumps with mkvmerge or ffmpeg -c copy at the end of the process. I don't think that would be terribly hard to implement.

[Matte27]

My point is that it takes some time to splice the segments manually whether you are doing it for the 1st time or 100th time and I don't see why the tas tool wouldn't do it. Yes people would get by without it but having it would be very convenient.