HelldiverSquadron wrote in Mon Apr 21, 2014 7:54 pm:Seemed like a binary trait. I opened it in Notepad ++, but it was just rubbish. I don't mean that it is a video format, but rather could I import it into, say, Blender, and then export it as something else? It's way too optimistic, I know. Thanks, all!
again, the format is basically seralized FlightGear properties, please see $FG_ROOT/Docs/flightrecorder.README - these are all just "numbers", the format is determined by FlightGear, and these numbers do not mean ANYTHING outside FlightGear, and even inside FlightGear it's really just the flight recorder subsystem that is able to open/process those files, read in the numbers and map them to the corresponding FlightGear properties - which in turn allows things to be animated/replayed over time JUST VIA FlightGear.
There's really no need to continue this discussion at all - all the responses given so far were rather exact, detailed and 100% correct. There's no reasonable way to visually "replay" those files outside FlightGear, short of rewriting FlightGear itself, or extending another flight simulator to partially re-interpret certain values. Unless that is something that you are interested, willing and capable to do, I'd just leave it at that.
What FlightGear is writing to those files is not actual "visual" stuff at all, it's just "gibberish" in the sense of properties that are only meaningful to FlightGear itself, and its features, most properties are in fact aircraft specific. Imagine those files to be containers for binary FlightGear properties, i.e. things like altitude, longitude, latitude - but also engine settings, flap settings, gear status etc.
So there's really just numbers stored there, nothing visual that would make sense to visually re-interpret outside a flight simulator environment like FlightGear.
To actually replay even just a single aircraft specific animation in FlightGear, you would have to write a python script that 1) loads the aircraft, 2) looks up the 3D objects, 3) maps the properties to animations - and completely ignore anything related to scenery, because it's typically just aircraft specific stuff that is recorded.
Please just believe us, and consider spending more time reading and understanding what you're told, instead of re-asking redundant questions, thank you !