MFormats SDK as a game recording library for developers

The addition of GPU-powered H.264 encoding via Nvidia’s NVENC and Intel’s Quick Sync has opened up a new market for Medialooks’ MFormats SDK.

There are at least two SDKs available on the market that claim to solve this problem: Bandisoft Capture Library and liteCam Game SDK. Bandisoft’s price, as stated on the web site, is $14,900 per title; liteCam did not publish the price for its SDK.

On the end user side, there’s Nvidia’s ShadowPlay, which naturally makes use of NVENC for H.264 encoding and can also record continuously to a buffer, allowing the user to save his gaming experience retrospectively.

Let’s take a closer look and see if MFormats SDK is a better solution.

Benefits of using MFormats SDK for built-in video capture

Encoding:

• Encoding is handled by a dedicated SIP-core, so there’s no effect on the GPU’s or CPU’s performance.
• You can configure the encoder (or let the user do so) for quality vs. file size.

Simplicity:

• MFormats SDK does not use DirectShow or any other third-party video framework: we provide clear redistribution guidelines that explain how to ship our libraries with your application.
• MFormats SDK — unlike DirectShow or GStreamer — is not a pipeline-based framework: there are no graphs to build and debug, programming is straightforward and predictable.
• It is very easy to integrate into your code: take a look at these quick guides for file playback and video capture.

Prices and licensing:

• Although MFormats SDK with the GPU encoding requires the top edition of the product, the prices are very competitive.
• Better licensing: per developer, not per title.

Features

• Capture the user’s web cam and microphone to create a picture-in-picture video of the gamer with audio commentary.
• The Expert edition of MFormats SDK features a time shifting module, which allows to easily implement a similar feature to Nvidia’s ShadowPlay.

Built-in video capture vs. other game recording solutions

There’s a market for video recording products for gamers — both software and hardware. We think, however, that implementing video capture in the game itself, is better for the following reasons:

• You can choose (or let the user decide) wether or not he wants to capture certain on-screen graphics (such as game controls, alerts, etc.).
• Recording can be turned on or off based on game logic.
• You can use our SDK to make the content of your game more realistic — such as have TV screens display real television channels (streamed live from the Internet).