Softmod Depot

sorry I've been a noob and asking alot of questions but my couzin says ther is a way to get recorded Halo 3 videos off of the 360 without hacking it,and by useing a windows vista computer is this true? I've tried looking it up and stuff but i havent found anything except for stuff on watching videos from a computer on the 360 but thats about it my couzin said that there is something you have to download but he doesnt know where and neither do I could someone please help me out please and thank you ^_^

You need a capture card, and its not just for vista, xp will do the trick. I have a dazzle dvd recorder, its a external capture card, its not the best around, but it works for me. ill upload a video and see if its what you are talking about.

http://useruploads.mythica.org/view/Untitled-1127.wmv.html (http://useruploads.mythica.org/view/Untitled-1127.wmv.html)

ghetto rig style run through pc and display video on moniter through means not meanchened

thats one good thing about halo 3, you get a whole bunch of clips, then record them to the computer in big bunches. instead of having to keep recording hoping that some rly awesome plays happen like in halo 2 and filling up your hdd in just a couple days of play.

i cant see the vid right now because im at school and surprisingly  its letting me on the site lol umm no not dazzle i've heard about it and and its like what $60? um no my couzin says there is a program that lets you access the 360 hdd and take the vids and stuff off of it but he doesnt know what it is and neither do i so imma try to keep looking for it.

the videos on the 360's hdd are not actualy videos, that is how they are only like 1mb for 10minutes of 1080p video, its just a reference of certain points on difference objects that get saved, then when it goes to playback all of that, it dresses it up with the full body and textures and everything. I see it as just being a wireframe save, that is the only thing i see being able to be saved to that size and then being able to be re-rendered that fast for playback.

mmmm possibly i dunno but i kinda think it really is a video i think it like super compresses th videos and stuff or something and  also i got the normal 360 xbox live core package or what ever it is with the 20GB HDD  and i have only 8GBs left and there is no videos or demos on the system,could game save and stuff be taking up all this space? oh and there is no music or pics on it either

the 20gb hdd only has like 13gb to start out with. and game saves can be very hefty compared to xbox1 gamesaves (not to mention download content and updates for games sometimes weekly), to look at where you memory is, just go into settings, and you can bring up  a memory manager, kinda like a file explorer and you can see where all your memoery is being taken up at. bungie said it themselves that they used a highly compression system for halo 3, but they never said it actualy saved video. right now the highest compression systems (xvid, mpeg-4, wmv-9) save are about 1-3gb per 30 minutes of 1080p video compared to 5-10gb of uncompressed video depending if it came from blu-ray or hd-dvd.

30 minute video 1080i 1.1 gigs at 17000kbps video 600kbps audio

could it be saving it as and flv file? cause i know flv is flash but its way smaller than MPEG-4 and what not cause i just got this youtube down loader and downloaded a youtube video and the program comes with a converter and can convert the videos to alot of different formats but when it downloads the video from youtube the videos are downloaded as flv

flv can only have stereo and mono sound, so it cant be that either. im still sticking with my wireframe theory

yeah yeah, its probably just a marker on the disc, with the elements in the "video file" to recreate the incident, best thing i can think of for the file being that small

no no no, there is no disk element, there is no wireframe.

All it saves is the code, basically it saves a GIGANTIC text file, like notepad or something, and then when you go to play it it loads up that text file. That is why it does not save your voice communications. Your voices are not written into the code of the game. So if you were to want to take the videos off of your XB360 and put them on your PC, I guess you would have to have an XBOX360 emulator to run the code you get from your Xbox.

ADDED: a capture card would be the only way to go, thats what I do when I want something.

text or not, the file would be realativly the same size, its not a BIG text file, cause 1mb of "text" translated to video would be like 5 sec, IF that (probably less) now it could be a big text files with points to a particualr part on the disc...... which would go with what snafu was saying

do you have a source for what you said? just curuios

Topic: Use a video-capture card like Snafupossum suggested - by far the easiest method.

Off-topic: The film content from Halo 3 are not merged-frame media (i.e. they are not rendered content), they are simply a structure of events that happened in that particular play which are re-rendered when opened in Halo 3.
Some-what like what Quokimbo states.. it's just a content file, the environments/models/textures/particles etcetera are all already stored in Halo 3 and just need to be re-applied to the events given by the content.

Example: Player moves 2ft north-east to co-ordinate x,y, changes weapon, jumps, crouches then throws a grenade in direction: xy...

Instructions for rendering content can be compressed a lot more than rendered content since rendered content does not repeat as much. Think of each frame being a picture, each picture constructs a major set of pixels defined by color RGB(A) and position X, Y. Say that each image was in a 1280x1024 resolution.. you would have to give the Color and Position for each of the 1,310,720 pixels. Say that each color and co-ordinate was in hex and then compressed, at least they would be 1 byte each. Max color = 255/FF so
FFAB03FF would mean 255 red, 171 green, 003 green and 255 opacity. That's already 8 bytes for one pixel, add the co-ordinates, say giving a max of 4095/FFF you add another 6 bytes, 14 bytes per pixel * 1,310,720 pixels = 18,350,080 bytes (17,920kb/17.5mb) per frame. That size would be assuming every single pixel was a different color because if color is in mass you can compress that as well by giving co-ordinates for repeats. But in saying that, assume there is 30 frames per second in the movie, 30*17.5=525mb, now that would be 525 mb for 1 second of uncompressed data. Of course the method I've used for calculating is way off from modern compression algorithm's it gives you a fair idea of the size.

Now if you use command-driven text through out a file, you're going to be repeating a lot of things which can be re-positioned at will, Say bungie could have implemented some code that would suggest: a = Move north 1 step, or A=move 2steps/repeat.. blah blah blah.. you get the idea. I'm too tired to finish this explanation lol.

This is my first post, so hey people. =)

Btw.. without going over all the text above, there's a post by one of the bungie staff somewhere on their site saying that it's content and not actual media. Well.. at least you learnt something :D or maybe try to..?

good job lol, i was close on my theory

I will do a little more research on this, but I read about a way to use a certain site that uses a reference in your bungie.net account and downloads the videos in your files share, and then emails you once it uploads it to IT'S site, for you to download to your computer.

This process takes like 3-5 days, but it gets done and looks nice. I will try to explain a little less retardedly.

Sign up at site (x)

go to your bungie.net account and get information site (x) needs

site (x) downloads video

site (x) uploads video to it's site

site (x) sends you email notifying you of completion

go to site (x) to retrieve your video!

I will post again if no one else reads of this before I get to it!