First of all: the entire OSNews team would like to wish you a very merry Christmas. Even if you’re not religious, there’s always porn on the internet, right? Anywho, these wishes are a bit tardy, but that’s because I’ve been fighting a battle with my computer the past few days trying to find a way to record Minecraft footage so I could make a Christmas wish from inside my creations – a losing battle, so it would seem. So, for Christmas, I have two OSNews Asks items for you to ponder. First, help me record Minecraft footage. Second, and this is of more practical use to myself and probably others as well, help me to set up an automatic backup solution that backs up the contents of one folder on an external hard drive to another external drive.
Recording Minecraft
First, Minecraft. I want to record a full screen Minecraft session. The most common way to do this is to use Fraps, but sadly, Fraps costs money, and I’m not going to pay for something I’ll only use once. The free version is limited to 30 second recordings, which is pointless. I’m sure Fraps is awesome, though – I’m hearing a lot of good things about it.
My second option was to use Camtasia Studio 7.1. Camtasia is an absolutely awesome application, with a built-in multitrack audio and video editor, transitions, captions, and all that stuff. It’s perfect, doesn’t lag Minecraft while recording, is easy to use, and supports many codecs. It has one flaw, however; a flaw which is, well, rather problematic: it can’t record Minecraft. It does actually record, but just shows a black screen with the mouse pointer swooshing from left to right. I’m assuming this is a Java issue (Minecraft is Java), but can’t find a solution.
I’ve tried loads of other tools, and they all suck for one reason or another – WeGame, Taksi, HyperCam, CamStudio (insert co-ed joke here), and god (it’s okay, it’s his big day today) knows what else, and they all ended in fail. Any help here is greatly appreciated (running Minecraft on Windows 7).
Folder back-up
My job is to be a freelance translator – so I translate for clients from the comforts of my own home. This means I have a considerable amount of important documents sitting on my server, which need to be backed up properly. Since these documents are all under NDA (default practice in the translation business), I can’t use any of these fancy internet-based storage solutions like DropBox.
My server runs Windows 7 – it will remain that way, so don’t bother trying to convert me to something else. The folder in question is located on an external hard drive, connected via USB, and its size is a measly 225 MB – the beauty of just holding documents. My preferred option would be to have an automated solution – without using any paid-for applications – that backs up the folder in question from the external hard drive to an 8GB USB drive I have lying around. This way, when I need to visit a client or want to work away from home, I can just take the 8GB USB drive with me. When I get home, I plug the drive back in. As I’m typing this, I’m realising that the taking-it-with-me-thing makes it a whole lot more complicated, since the sync would need to be two-way. If this can be done – perfect. If not – taking it with me is not vital; I can always just transfer the relevant documents to my laptop if I leave the house.
Preferably, we’d use nothing but tools available in Windows 7 Ultimate. I’m sure someone clever can come up with something using Volume Shadow Copy or whatever, which might be useful to all of us.
Merry Christmas to all!
I have used Microsoft’s SyncToy. It’s easy to setup and use, with many options for what and how to synch. It’s free.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=C26EFA3…
Exactly what I was going to recommend. It works and is easy to setup. It works across XP, Vista and Win7. It uses the built in Sync services that you can also get working by yourself but SyncToy is so much easier.
Fraps will work well with Minecraft, no?
And +1 for the recommendation of SyncToy. I use it all the time to synchronize files under Windows and find it a great little utility.
Take a look at http://rdiff-backup.nongnu.org/.
You might as well recommend http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ euh… http://code.google.com/p/duplicati/ for Windows 7.
Because you can store the data anywhere you like as it is encrypted.
I’m a linux user so, for bi-directional sync, the first thing that comes to mind is Unison.
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
I’ve only ever tried it on Linux, but it’s got Windows binaries and the Linux version has never failed me.
I’ve been using synctoy for a month now. And where did I learn about it? here.
http://www.osnews.com/story/24085/15_Free_Windows_Tools_for_Every_D…
Only in OSNews could the editor ask for a solution and its right on OSNews
Thom, welcome back from whatever job you had.
And like me and probably you and 99.9% of all other people Thom dont have total recall memory either.
Cobian Backup has worked well for me. You might want to give it a shot
http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm
I like Cobian too,
pretty good software !
Works for me ..
cobian isn’t OSS nor perfect
cobian is the only windows gui sync tool that properly synchronized all file attributes (dates) in my testing
AeroFS (http://www.aerofs.com/) is essentially a dropbox clone that works across your own machines in an ad hoc fashion. Might be worth looking at.
In order to assist in recording game videos in Windows – you can try disabling the hardware acceleration features of your video driver. This will prevent it from using overlays, etc. which cannot be captured with most screenshot and/or video capture tools (I’m surprised fraps can circumvent that).
Yes, but won’t that, uhm, hinder performance of Minecraft?
Not a lot I suspect if you have a fairly fast machine.
I can *almost* play Minecraft on my Atom netbook with intel video – which I assure you does not benefit from hardware accleration
Overlay is probably the culprit here – which allows the video card to draw directly to the screen without going through the OS’s video compositing layer. Without the OS being able to capture the video before it is displayed to the screen – it has no way to intercept the contents that the card is sending. By disabling overlay, the video card is sending the contents back to the OS which then composites it and sends it back to the screen.
If you want to capture from the OS, that’s sort of your only choice – otherwise you must install some kind of capture device between your card and your screen.
I suspect Fraps somehow disables hardware overlay features automatically.
Edited 2010-12-25 20:02 UTC
I was able to more or less record full screen (F11) minecraft video at 30fps using the first screen capture app I found: Screen Video Recorder – by knocking down the hardware acceleration feature in windows xp to the 3rd tick from the left (disables direct3d it seems). This is running on my old AMD X2.
I also decreased my screen resolution slightly which helped a bit, and it’s not like minecraft has a lot of detail to capture
Minecraft’s performance problems seem to have little to do with graphics hardware and more to do with CPU usage since it’s written in Java.
The troubleshoot slider is no longer there in Windows 7.
Funny, shows up on my laptop with win7..
right click desktop, choose “Screen Resolution”, then click the little “Advanced Settings” hyperlink thing (hard to notice), then click “Troublshoot” tab, then click “Change Settings” button.
In any case, clearly this is all just a hack.
You could also run dxdiag and try disabling some of the directx features there to see if that helps *STRIKE that – win7 version of dxdiag doesn’t have any settings now.
or even petition Notch to include a way to disable use of overlay, etc… I see it only uses it in fullscreen here which is funny.
Alternatively, you could set your screencapture program to capture just a region of the screen where minecraft is running and use Minecraft in “windowed” mode instead.
Edited 2010-12-25 21:26 UTC
Mine’s ghosted, with a message stating that only if the driver supports it can you use the button. Odd.
More weirdness: when recording in full screen, there’s ZERO lag in Minecraft. When recording windowed (I already tried that), MUCH lag. Very odd.
Well, I’m out of ideas
How much fraps? maybe we can start a “Buy Thom Fraps” bounty!
Heh no it’s not worth it – all I wanted to do was record some Christmas wishes inside Minecraft – just one lousy video. We can fly to the goddamn moon, but recording a game session NOOOO.
I might reconsider and still buy Fraps. A semi-regular series for OSNews about me dicking around in Minecraft might be a nice diversion from all the serious stuff we do.
I pledge $5 minus Paypal fees
Or you can just go here-
http://primewares.com/
Which is my “go to” site for finding an app that does a specific job. They have over 39,000, all free, all Windows, and their search engine rocks. Just type in what you need the app to do, they find an app that does it. It don’t get simpler than that!
Edited 2010-12-26 07:09 UTC
I use SyncBack from 2BrightSparks. In the free edition, you don’t get backup of open files and versioning, but you can schedule backups, or so I believe (don’t use that).
Can’t hurt to try it
http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/
I recommend this.
Unlike Robocopy, this is true 2-way. This is good.
I have used for two years now Cobian Backup. It is an open source software which seems to have an insane flexibility (and not command-line based). Until now, I managed to make it everything I wanted for the 15 PCs’ in the company I work. It supports the Volume Shadow thing and it is able to ….well…do almost anything. Give it a serious try!
http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html#freeware
have no ansvers to questions
http://sourceforge.net/projects/freefilesync/
never used sync toy but they’re probably the same.
http://taksi.sourceforge.net/
You probably need screen capture software that is able to capture direct3d. Taski seems to be able to do this on my windows 7. I tested with command & conquer: Red alert 3
Read the article. Taksi didn’t work for me.
Have you tried Expression Encoder’s Screen Capture functionality?
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=75402be…
no, you said it sucked in one way or another, but I had forgotton that by the time I posted it.
Merry Christmas!
For backup I would use Git. Seems really good for working with documents (as you update them). You can push/pull changes with the server/from the thumbdrive.
Playing minecraft is a bit tardy for sure. Why dont you say hi to these lifeless idiots @ http://www.livestream.com/minecrafterryday
Oh btw theres your free recording tool. You can stream it live and its autoarchived and problem is solved.
And if you dont want to pay for fraps dont cry here but go to TPB.
“My server runs Windows 7” << FAIL
Want backup use Xcopy + Sched (yes thats a thing like cron in windows
)
Edited 2010-12-25 23:33 UTC
It sometimes has to double as a media centre. Since Linux still doesn’t have decent audio and graphics stacks, Linux is simply not an option.
This is… weird. You’re surely aware that Moovida, XBMC and its offsprings (Boxee, etc.) are available on Linux as well as Windows. And I am assuming that it either works – as in everything works for the intended use case! – or it does not – as in, some critical piece of driver is missing like audio or video which is kinda rare these days. The driver missing some functionality available only on the Windows version? Sure, it saddens me to say that it still happens. But to not work suitably for playing sound and/or video at all? Unlikely.
I have a crappy Intel integrated graphics chipset that despite its bad driver works decently with XBMC. No frame drops, no tearings, no lags whatsoever even with Full HD video and you can’t possibly get much worse than that in Europe as far as I know. There are also plenty of options that will let you setup a UPnP streaming media server for your LAN on the same machine for free in case you have a PS3, XBox 360 or some other DLNA-capable device at home.
So, unless you’re doing something unusual with your set up, Linux based HTPC software should suit just fine on a machine that needs to double as a media center and a file server of sorts with all the richness that the standard UNIX utilities – think cron & rsync for your particular case – provides.
I understand your bias towards Windows but to state that Linux falls short as a media center system sounds a bit far fetched, don’t you think? Specially when taking into account that it serves as base for several commercial HTPC solutions available in the market today…
Edited 2010-12-26 01:59 UTC
Two possibilities:
1. Thom already tried that and it didn’t work for some reason
2. Thom can’t be bothered to try that because he is busy doing other things and as it already works he has very little reason to change anything
I am not suggesting that he should go out of his way to change an existing (and working) setup for something that might or might not work for him. That would have been a waste of time, indeed. My peeve was with the assertion that ‘Linux audio and graphics stacks are a mess’ and therefore it is not an option for a HTPC. While the driver situation is far from ideal, no arguments there, the existing solutions are serviceable enough to the point that a lot of people are happy with their MythTVs, Boxees, XBMCs, Roku Boxes, etc.
If this statement were coming from Walt Mossberg which, despite what he might think about himself, is as clueless as a doorstep then it would be somewhat understandable but as one of OSNews editors, Thom should definitely know better that that.
Now for the sake of an argument, let’s say that Thom did change his HTPC to a Linux-based solution and that it meets his needs properly as far as the media center part is concerned. Then he could simply setup a rsync job in cron to handle his backup to some other location easily – a five minutes task, if that – or install something like GRSync, Sparkleshare or Back in Time if using a GUI is what floats his boat. The possibilities are virtually endless there…
And you think I didn’t try running it on Linux?
– surround sound issues, optical out not working, and so on.
– X is incompatible with my bog-standard HDTV (1080i). All I get is either a garbled screen, or a black one.
Using another (smaller) monitor, I did get to test everything out.
– Linux could not properly display 720p and up, while Windows could.
– Remote control took hours to get working.
– Random crashes
– Random audio glitches
– Random video glitches
– Sleep/wake did not work.
– Boot time from power button to Boxee twice as long as on Windows 7.
And these are just the issue I remember. I tested all this on two machines, results more or less the same. So please, don’t come in here and just assume that I’m talking out of my ass.
That is unfortunate but I still fail to understand how did you jump to the conclusion that Linux-based HTPC solutions are not suitable to anyone just because it did not work particularly well on your setup despite plenty of evidence pointing to the contrary for other people all over the web.
My problem is NOT that Linux did not work for YOU but rather the underhanded comment saying that Linux is not an option for media centers. If we’re taking anecdotal evidence here at face value then Windows must be a failure as a HTPC as it is nowhere near this household whereas XBMC has been working flawlessly for quite some time now. See? I can make bold and baseless comments as well…
Edited 2010-12-26 20:37 UTC
He highlighted every problem he had, and these are common complaints, when trying to use Linux as a HTPC.
Linux evangelists tend to stick their heads in the sand when people make complaints about using Linux in situation X and Y, and pretend their isn’t problems.
I not saying it can’t work e.g. Embedded Media Tanks with Linux work fine such as the Popcorn Hour A-200 which I own (and is a very nice bit of kit).
There are a mixture of different problems.
Problem is both sided.
Good nice Linux people who will help you out of problems end up being insulted because they have no interested in X problem. Because X problem does not effect them.
Also when a Good Nice person says Linux is suitable for Z use. A person brings up and say it don’t to X as well. Then wonders why they get head bitten off.
Evangelists is a bad term. Most who end up called that are not.
Like my case for running Linux on my current machine is that HTPC on it does not work under windows. Unless you class random-ally dropping out audio requiring a reboot to fix as fine. Hardware issue that does not effect Linux.
Its horses for courses. If you pick the wrong horse for the wrong course it will drive you nuts. This is not unique to Linux or Windows. I have noticed something as well when building a windows only HTPC if the parts are Linux supported as well the Windows only HTPC works more stable.
Now parts that have issues with Linux completely normally end up being the ones where you end up with windows doing stupid things like loading wrong drivers and turning what should be a perfect fun machine into hell.
My machine is the wrong horse to build a Windows HTPC on. Now someone might have a machine where a Windows HTPC is a better match good luck to them. Or the might have the machines that are not a good match for either Windows or Linux HTPC and really should have been left in the store.
This is a different issue. There is a real need for a form of adviser to tell people if the hardware they have is sane to built a HTPC solution out of and what OS would be suitable and what level of stability they can expect.
There are known driver issues for Windows and Linux HTPC solutions. Yes Linux more to avoid at this stage.
Problem is the Windows only people come out and say too often that Windows is the ideal selection as well. Both sides need to cool there jets and work more from a horses for courses point of view.
You need a product that can perform validation after each transfer. Otherwise you are relying on blind faith that the files transferred successfully.
Two utilities I can think of are:
* md5deep (run under cygwin)
* ExactFile (windows only)
Ideally I would like an open source product which can reliably perform a transfer and validation. I am having difficulty finding such a programme, especially one which is cross platform.
= Recording Minecraft =
This might be a place to try recording the session under Linux ? java runs under Linux and I’m hoping screengrabber java apps under Linux will work fine…
= Folder back-up =
Solution (1) DVCS:
First I would suggest to try and use version control… something like Mercurial or Git. Then set it up in such a way that it pull’s on the stick every N-mins as long as that drive is available.. nice thing is that you get the two syncronisation as part of distributed version control.
Solution (2) UNISON[1]:
If you cannot or don’t want to use version control (to much overhead?) then you might want to look at Unison. It runs on Windows and Linux and does two way syncing.
(of course you need to find a way to deal with merging conflicts, but unison tries to be real careful for you so not to lose data)
Only gripe with the two above is that you’ll need to script something up yourself to do run the job, handle availability of the drive and choose something to handle synchronization conflicts. (which might be more straight forward if you use version control)
[1] http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
xcopy /e /d
can be used for this
as long as MS has not taken it out of windows 7
just have one “bat” file for each side of the copy
http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/
Free, nice.
My personal files amount to around 700 GB. These files include personal music recordings, photography, lots of art related files, code, etc…
I’m also extremely paranoid about loosing data / silent corruption / bit rot / drive failure / etc. I keep about 4 copies of the 700 GB data set.
With that much data and number of copies to maintain, I’ve tried several backup solutions [block level / file level] and what I found was that they didn’t verify file transfers. Run md5deep after any of the backup ops and you find most software fails silently. I found this out after validating files of an external hd that was loosing data to either bit rot or some other failure.
Even when the software work “normally” and didn’t report any problems I found that about approximately 13 files would become corrupt on transfers of the whole data set.
So, I would second the notion of verification. Even if the verification is done as a post operation.
K. Enough of the background.
I’m currently using SyncBackPro to sync devices on the pc and ChronoSync on the mac.
The reason I use syncback
– runs at start / in the background
– runs sync op on the insertion of a external drive
– really slow [either hash / crc] compare that can be turned on as needed
– drive aliases. aka run when ‘backup’ drive is inserted.
– allows for bi-directional syncs
– text to speech that can be setup to announce starts / stops / fails
– only copies what’s needed
– verifies by copy, then re-reading the src/dest and comparing. This extra read of the src catches faulty src.
I’m currently using it to shuttle/backup my school data. I setup the initial profile about two years ago and haven’t looked back. I plug in my usb key and it transfers everything. And the best [geeky] part is that when I insert the key, I hear the voice “key copy initiated”, and “key copy complete” when it completes. Makes me think I have one of those sci-fi computers that talks to me. The software works well for my purposes.
That said, I also have some custom python scripts that I use for mass copies and verification. The scrips are broken out into copy / generate md5 list / verify. They could be used as the basis for an automated system. If you’re interested, I wouldn’t mind opening them up. Email me if you are.
I never got a chance to test it, but Unison also looked interesting. Sadly, school started and I didn’t have time to read more about it / investigate.
As you are using md5deep, do you also know of a tool to remove or better yet hardlink duplicate files ? You obviously did a lot of testing.
To be honest, I’ve written a script which can do it. Just don’t have the guts to run it yet. 🙂
If you are using linux then try fdupes, it will either delete or hardlink the duplicate files depending on what you choose to do.
Thanks I’ll have a look at that.
Duplicates are something that I rarely have to deal with.
You could always test your script by replacing the file operation with a print statement. Dump the output of the script into a text file and visually check. That way you can make sure you’re getting what you want before the actual changes are made. I’ve saved myself a few times with doing this.
But you’d obviously be doing that to a copy of the data… right
I tend to avoid linking files that I want to be portable across file systems / os.
Best of luck / Merry Christmas
I think that you’re reading too much into his comments. He is not saying it is out of the question for everyone, just out of the question for him.
And the audio and video stack on linux does suck. The times I get least amount of suckage from X is when using nvidia cards (despite the fact that they are completely alien to the stack).
So I’ll say that rare is the instance that everything works completely and flawlessly together. I like boxee and xbmc to tinker around with but generally my requirements are not that specific so they work quite well. I have seen those that have much more strict needs and for them it often nearly works but is never 100%.
I would add though that video with vdpau on mplayer beats the living shit out of any other hardware accelerated player on ANY os in terms of support and flexibility.
Edited 2010-12-26 23:40 UTC
Can’t you just use the HDMI output on the video card and feed it to a DVR and then transfer the file back to your main machine. Set up a second machine with Mythtv or whatever you like and feed the HDMI output to it.
…try using Quicktime v10.
File > New Screen Recording. I just tried it with Minecraft Classic and it recorded fine…
Hope that helps. You don’t get to select what area of the screen to record (as far as I can see), but it records video and sound nicely. I am sure you can convert the H.264 output to the medium of your choice if you so desire 🙂
Even if you’re not religious, there’s always porn on the internet, right?
Would you care to explain that comment and why it belongs in this article? This might not have been the wisest comment, but I’ll wait for your explanation before I judge.
I’ll try to explain how I read it: even if you’re not into the spirit of christmas (from a religious point of view) (let’s count paganism as some sort of a religion for simplicity’s sake), you can still have a good time enjoying all the _lovely_ christmas-themed porn which tends to spontaneously appear all over the internet.
I think he was explaining/defending his bringing up christmas at all in his post
Since somebody else brought it up, I too thought it was crass and unprofessional.
Here’s another backup option from Microsoft
http://explore.live.com/windows-live-mesh-sync-skydrive-using?os=ot…
Also screen recorder from Microsoft
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.03.utilityspotligh…
Edited 2010-12-26 22:20 UTC
if you can spare the cash: http://bit.ly/c75nvi
otherwise: http://bit.ly/cSWZuJ
Since several weeks I use a custom batch file with rsync and vshadow to backup my entire Windows to an external drive in live. I have an history of the last 15 backups and only modified files are backup up. You can easily customize the batch file to fill your own needs : http://users.softlab.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/win32backup.html
rsync is available for Window & there are plenty of UI wrappers for it like DeltaCopy.
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5
OSNews is supposed to be inclusive of all tech lovers, no matter where we come from or what religious affiliations we hold. So as a tech-loving Muslim I feel left out, or glossed over as insignificant, and slightly offended, when you congratulate people on Christmas, but not say, on Eid, but then on top of that you tell the “others” to enjoy porn, something which is clearly offensive to me and many others (including Christians and atheists).
I know you didn’t mean it to be offensive or exclusive, but keep in mind that OSNews is read by people all over the world from lots of different backgrounds, and some of these Christian-centric or Euro-centric ideas can really strike a nerve. I hope in the future we can stick to tech and leave things like Christmas out of it (easier than having to include all of them).
Considering the editors likely hail from a Western background and write for a largely Western audience, I have no problem maintaining Christian-centric or Euro-centric ideas. It is a little unreasonable to expect OSnews to cater to every group.
However I don’t believe pornography has anything to do with good editorialiship or good living.
Well, we are what we are. We ARE west-oriented – we’re not pretending otherwise. And here in the west, Christmas is one of the most important holidays of the year, for Christians, Muslims, and non-believers alike. We do a small Christmas greeting every year – not because we’re religious (as far as I know, nobody on the staff is deeply religious; in fact, I’m not religious at all), but because it’s THE moment to backpedal for a second and think about all you have, and all the things most people in the world do not have.
You don’t have to be religious – you don’t even need to be a Christian – to value the meaning of Christmas. In the end, despite all the nonsensical rhetoric, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are basically one and the same – the same messages, the same ideas, the same beliefs, the same god.
Most religions have a day similar to Christmas, but since we’re a western-oriented site, run by western people, it’s Christmas that we choose to ‘use’. That’s not meant to offend, and it’s not meant to belittle other people’s religions. There are thousands – millions, probably – websites out there that celebrate festivities from other religions, and that’s awesome. That’s what the web is about.
As a Dutchman through and through, I believe in equality and tolerance above all else. However, equality and tolerance do NOT mean we MUST either NOT do a Christmas greeting, OR do greetings for all religious festivities ever. In fact, it means that you respect other people’s beliefs and ideas – NOT that you bend over backwards just to please everyone.
I guess what I’m trying to say is this: don’t get your knickers in a twist.
See knickers in twist comment above.
Honestly – if you’re offended by that, then I suggest you avoid the internet at all costs. Sex is just sex, and porn is just porn. Deal with it.
Edited 2010-12-28 09:45 UTC
Lighten up … stop taking everything soo seriously.
Edited 2010-12-28 10:06 UTC
chill out, have some egg nog