I would like to create an AVI file from the output of my DirectX driven programm. What kind of possibilites do I have? I have a videocard with TV output but I don''t want to record the output on a video and read it again from it... Can that work somehow with fullscreen or perhaps with windowed mode?

Here''s a suggestion for you. Unless you have a monstrously fast hard drive/cpu/memory configuration, you might want to consider just writing to a file all of the objects that are on the screen at any given time, or storing them in memory to be written out later. This will save your framerate. Then, modify your program to be able to read in this file and then proceed to parse the file and output exactly what is in it, just as if you had gone through it.

By doing this, you can re-render every frame of animation and then save them to a file. If you try and save the frames as you go along, you''re likely to run into I/O problems, which will drop your framerate and as a result, your AVI will appear choppy as you move around because your view will shift by an ''unrealistic'' amount.

So, when you''re re-rendering everything and saving them to files, simply number them. Then, use a program that can take all of those images and save them to a .avi file or mpeg or whatever else you want to make. Be warned that it will take up a lot of space. The AVI file creator should do its own compression.

In case you''re wondering where the hell I''m getting all this from, I''m writing my Masters thesis on distributed movie generation using the Torque Game Engine. It''s pretty slick to be honest. I''ll post a link to my work at some point, but it''s not scheduled to be finished until February, maybe not till May. Depends on what happens with the two classes I have left to take. One of them just got cancelled on me, so I might push it out to May instead of February, just so I can procrastinate a bit more.

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