hl-capture

Internal rustdoc

hl-capture is deprecated. bxt-rs provides new video recording tools which use Vulkan and support Windows.

hl-capture is a tool for recording Half-Life videos on Linux, written in Rust. It's similar to Half-Life Advanced Effects, but focuses on video capturing rather than advanced movie-making functionality.

hl-capture is designed to be fast and convenient. Video and sound are encoded with FFMpeg right away into any desirable format like mp4, mkv or webm. This, together with utilizing multiple threads and GPU-accelerated processing, makes hl-capture way faster than HLAE or Source's startmovie.

Features

• Fast video and sound capturing and encoding into almost any of the formats supported by FFMpeg.
• GPU-accelerated resampling.
• TAS compatibility out of the box, including engine restarts.

Requirements

• 32-bit FFMpeg libraries. FFMpeg 3.4 is known to work; FFMpeg 4 will not work. You can download pre-built working libraries with the main codecs here.
• 32-bit OpenCL (look for something like ocl-icd).

Usage

Check the wiki for installation and usage instructions.

Goals

• High capturing speed.
• Compatibility with TASes, including those utilizing engine restarts and RNG manipulation.

Building

1. Get Rust 1.38.0 with the i686-unknown-linux-gnu target.
   • This can be done using rustup with:

     rustup toolchain add 1.38.0
     rustup run 1.38.0 rustup target add i686-unknown-linux-gnu
     

   • Rust 1.38.0 is used due to building issues with the ffmpeg crate which, unfortunately, went unmaintained several years ago.
2. Install 32-bit FFMpeg libraries. FFMpeg 3.4 is known to work; FFMpeg 4 will not work.
   • Use the following commands for a minimal build of FFMpeg known to work for building hl-capture:

     git clone --depth=1 --branch=release/3.4 https://github.com/FFMpeg/FFMpeg.git ffmpeg
     cd ffmpeg
     ./configure --disable-programs --disable-doc --enable-cross-compile --arch=x86_32 --target_os=linux --prefix="$PWD/install" --cc="gcc -m32" --disable-static --enable-shared
     make && make install
     

3. Install 32-bit SDL2.
4. Install 32-bit OpenCL.
5. PKG_CONFIG_ALLOW_CROSS=1 cargo +1.38.0 build --release
   • If you built FFMpeg manually, use the following command:

     PKG_CONFIG_ALLOW_CROSS=1 PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/path/to/ffmpeg/install/lib/pkgconfig LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/ffmpeg/install/lib cargo +1.38.0 build --release
     

Look at how the Travis build is set up for minimal build of the dependencies.