# Media Capture Options

PinballY lets you create the background media items for each of your tables - images and videos of the playfield, backglass, and so on - by launching the table in its player program and capturing screen shots (still or video) while it runs. The Media Capture options dialog lets you set up the details for these screen shot operations.

Note that this dialog doesn't actually initiate a capture operation; it's just for setting up the options. To perform a media capture for a game:

- Close the options dialog and go back to the main game window
- Navigate to the game you want to capture media for
- Bring up the "System" menu by pressing the Service Enter button
- Select the "Game Setup" command
- Select the "Capture Images & Video" command
- Choose the items you want to capture using the menu
- Select the "Begin Capture" command

## Option details

Wait for game to start: This setting lets you specify a delay time before the first screen shot is captured, to give the game a chance to initialize and enter its "attract mode". This delay time starts after the player program has loaded, so it doesn't need to count the time required to start the player; it only needs to count the time it takes the player to load the table, plus the time the table itself takes to complete its own startup. Most tables have a "self test" that they have to complete when first loaded, so you should take this time into account. The "right" value for this delay is unpredictable, because it depends on so many different factors: your system's performance, the player program's load time, and the individual table's ROM program. If you find that the screen capture is kicking in too soon for some tables, just increase this delay time setting a bit and try again.

Manual start: Check this box for a media type to make this item wait for you to press a button before capture starts for the item. Normally (if the box isn't checked), the capture process proceeds automatically through the list of items to be captured, without requiring any action on your part. If you check the "Manual start" box for an item, the capture process will stop when it reaches that item and wait for you to press a button. The capture status window will display a prompt to tell you when the capture process is paused like this.

Manual start mode is useful if you want to time an item so that it starts at a particular point in the game's attract mode display sequence. For example, you might want a DMD video capture to start at the beginning of the loop of messages that the table's ROM displays on the DMD between games.

Video and audio capture times: These settings let you set the length of the videos captured for the various windows. When PinballY plays back the videos, they'll all be shown in loops, so you effectively get "infinite" video coverage no matter how long you make the individual videos. But it's better to make the loops long enough to cover at least one whole attract mode loop for the game, so that the video isn't too repetitive, and so that you don't see jumps back to the beginning so often that they're distracting.

Manual stop: For video and audio items, you can choose "Manual stop" mode instead of the automatic timed capture that's used by default. In manual stop mode, the screen capture doesn't stop when the time limit is reached; instead, it keeps going indefinitely, until you manually intervene by pressing a button. You can use this in combination with Manual Start mode to set the exact starting and stopping points of a captured video loop. The capture status window shows a prompt when manual stop mode is in effect, letting you know that you have to press a button to finish the capture.

Use two-pass video encoding: Use this option if your captured videos look too choppy. Normally, PinballY tries to capture and compress video frames at the same time, in a single pass. This requires a fairly fast machine, though; on slower machines, the video encoder might drop frames (omit them from the resulting video) when it can't keep up with the live video rate. Dropped frames are visible as momentary freezes when you play back the video, which can make the video look choppy or jerky. If this happens on your machine, you can try two-pass encoding instead. Two-pass encoding initially captures the video frames without any compression, which can usually be done without any dropped frames even on slower machines. It then goes back and re-encodes the video to a compressed format after the full capture has finished. This takes longer overall because of the separate second pass, but should eliminate (or at least greatly reduce) dropped frames in the resulting video.

Optimization tip: If you've tuned your system to give higher priority to pinball software via a tool like PinAffinity, you should add ffmpeg.exe to the list of programs that receive priority CPU access. Ffmpeg is the program that PinballY uses to carry out screen capture operations. Screen capture is inherently CPU-intensive, so ffmpeg will do a better job of capturing if it's given full CPU resources.