Is there any way you can view demos (LMPs) in Win Media Player or RealPlayer?

^topic. thanks in advance

no

demos only record player movement and actions, when you watch an lmp it's actually being done in real time in the game (as is the case, if the player does the same exact thing the enviornment reacts the same exact way), rather than taking a bunch of screenshots and slapping them in a file (which is what you want essentially).

Wasn't there a way to convert demos into .avis (without sound)?

Indeed, lmp2avi or something, but along with not having sound the picture quality is awful. I wouldn't mind being able to convert many doom marathon runs to qualities seen in some machinima films or frag movies you might find at ESreality. It might be a nice way to entertain a larger crowd.

Cyb said:

no

demos only record player movement and actions, when you watch an lmp it's actually being done in real time in the game (as is the case, if the player does the same exact thing the enviornment reacts the same exact way), rather than taking a bunch of screenshots and slapping them in a file (which is what you want essentially).

Exactly what I was going to say.

A solution is to use a program to record actions on the computer's screen, but no doubt it will take up a lot of memory and resources.

Vile said:

Indeed, lmp2avi or something, but along with not having sound the picture quality is awful. I wouldn't mind being able to convert many doom marathon runs to qualities seen in some machinima films or frag movies you might find at ESreality. It might be a nice way to entertain a larger crowd.

what is this esreality you speak of?

You should be able to pull this off using a source port and a screencapture program that does .avi. You wont get any sound though.

Why not use a sound recording program while playing the demo? Or would that blow up a computer?

the trick is to WRITE a program that dumps screenshots at normal intervals. fraps and similar are made to capture like every 1/5 second or something. Prboom, for example, uses 1/7ths of seconds I think, but then how do you smoothly RATE these back into normal time to sync with the sound?
I'm certainly no expert, but it was a hill I wasn't willing to continue to climb...
and capturing sound from a windows DOOM port is easy.

Cyb said:

demos only record player movement and actions, when you watch an lmp it's actually being done in real time in the game (as is the case, if the player does the same exact thing the enviornment reacts the same exact way), rather than taking a bunch of screenshots and slapping them in a file (which is what you want essentially).

I was going to come here and sound smart, but someone always beats me to it.

Anyway, yeah, what Cyb said. I wish a lot more games could record demos this way. I got a screencapture program and recorded a demo of me playing Mario Lost Levels 5-4 and it was about 75 megs uncompressed even if it was only about 20 seconds. I did finally get it down to 3 megs, but still, a Doom demo can usually be done a lot smaller. I think the default is 128K

pregnant with worms said:

what is this esreality you speak of?

ESReality is a place where demos are stored for multiple games. So does Challenge Tv.

http://www.esreality.com
http://www.challenge-tv.com

I honestly dont understand why its so hard for a source port to do this. Just code in parameters to dump out every frame in a demo, if not just making an AVI out of it. Add another parameter to dump out a WAV of the sound. Then you could combine the two together. WTF is the problem, really.

ixfd64 said:

A solution is to use a program to record actions on the computer's screen, but no doubt it will take up a lot of memory and resources.

Not really, I have an old proggy Dash coded that can render demos to AVIs. I used it a few times thinking I could put together a promo video for something, but alas, no good video editing software exists.

Run the LMP with a video camera pointed at screen :P

Haha, only way to go, Fodder :D