As a roblox developer, i really want to solve every single bug / glitch / issue that i find in my game, but this is more time consuming than it needs to be because roblox recordings are .WMV files.
On my discord server, i have a bug reports channel where people report bugs and issues they encounter inside of my game, but most of the times i see them reporting a bug video as a .WMV file, which i have to download onto my computer in order to see the video, this is very annoying as i dont want to download weird files or tons of videos onto my computer because i’d have to constantly waste time deleting the files to save myself some GB’s of data.
If recordings made in roblox were automatically converted to something like a MP4, it would save me so much time, as of now i need to tell them to convert it to .mp4 via youtube or some other site which takes just too much time and they wont know how to convert the video to something i dont have to download.
Honesty will help those who can’t afford the time to convert files and need a quick and easy solution.
Original Post Here (Edited because no one likes well-made posts and instead prefers one-sentence answers)
Yes, yes! This has bothered me for so long. If ever I wanted to show a video using Roblox’s default recorder, I had to go through a long process of video file converting. I used either Zamzar or some other file converter to turn the file into an .mp4.
But the process doesn’t stop there. The file becomes super large due to the nature of .mp4 files, and almost always too large for the forum’s max file size. I then have to hop on over to clideo, which helps with removing things like subtitles to get the file a bit smaller.
It’s so annoying! Not everyone knows how to follow this long process, and as a result many of the videos on the forums are in .wmv format. I don’t want to download a video every time I encounter it!
You may ask, why not upload it to Youtube? That presents two problems. One, it takes even more time to upload something to Youtube than to just convert the file, and two, you’ll need a non-personal Youtube channel. Because you can’t anonymously upload a Youtube video, you’re going to have to create a second email if you already haven’t so you can keep your forum presence separate from your personal life.
All the things mentioned above have happened to me! So please, make the default video format an .mp4, and preferably as light as possible! Thank you.
Support, having to see many of my friends send this without converting it or some developers using this recorder and not an alternative my Gyazo or ShareX to record videos or GIFs, it’s been hard to upload these and change the file type from .WMV to a .MP4 or .GIF.
Anywho, I’ve been on the platform for some time now and with the quality and how Roblox manages the built-in recorder, it’s been terrible with some of my past years on the platform in some external websites when uploading or just converting/compressing videos for development or gaming purposes. With my experiences on the forums and in the Engine, I see a lot of users not taking the advantage to convert these files and others who have the download them.
I mean it’s fine to download and see what the issue is with the OP or gaming videos, but it isn’t the best way to do so for a company and platform that has taken more advantages over other unique things than the recorder itself; on discord, I’ve sen friends or other developers upload these .WMV videos they’ve token from Studio/In-Game and show it to others, maybe the link could have some malicious intent in it somehow?
I rather have Roblox change how we use the built-in recorder such as the file type and quality of these recorders like ShareX or Gyazo with a .GIF/.MP4 file and not an old and useless file that isn’t supportable to “well”.
I might be incorrect on this, but WMV has twice the compression ratio as MP4, and MP4 uses lossy compression whereas WMV uses lossless compression.
I’m not sure why we would want to save videos in a worse quality, outside of just making it simpler for you to see bug reports users submit via discord.
The main intention with a video recorder is to make nice videos inside of Roblox. With all of that being said, it doesn’t make sense to use a lossy format over a lossless one… that being said, most people looking to record videos use a video recording software which blows Roblox’s out of the water, so maybe the only real purpose is for bug reports.
Just my two cents, but I do not personally think Roblox should switch to MP4, but they could consider switching to a different lossless format.
MP4 is just a container, originally meant as an extension of MP3. Yeah, WMV will definitelly be more efficient if you use a relic of a format from the late 90s like MPEG2, but it cannot beat H.264 or H.265 which can also be encoded and decoded on every GPU, drastically decreasing the performance impact while recording games.
It’d make more sense to have it be MP4 by default. MP4 is a standard almost everywhere and is compatible with most modern devices. It definitely would make it easier for users to send videos to their friends or as bug reports, as many platforms, such as Discord, do not support the embedding of WMV.
To me, it seems that the current video recording method has very low FPS and it looks very grainy. I doubt that WMV is any better than MP4, moving to MP4 as a standard would likely solve both compatibility issues for those who like to share videos of their gameplay, as well as quality itself.
Do keep in mind that part of the reason they don’t use MP4 might also have to do with licensing.
But I still agree, MP4 would be better for everyone.
It has better encoding and compression and is one of the most widely supported file types.
Using conversion software is just really cumbersome and costs extra time.
I switched to using external recording software but before that I dragged video files into video editing software and re-rendered them (this also results in some quality loss since otherwise the file will be very large).
