There's an option that's supposed to calculate the amount of added noise objectively (as close to it as possible, anyway), it's called PSNR. Add :psnr to your mencoder string and compare the values.
Btw, the 640x480 encode looks slightly worse at 320x240, as expected.
Ok, fine. I don't have anything to show you. I'm wrong and you are right. The whole suggestion sucks.
When you climb down from your cross, note that it was you who:
a) suggested something from the height of your experience;
b) argued that Johannes (who has already proved his experience with public encodes) was wrong, while the only proof of your claim was your experience; and
c) never showed anything to back up your claims of experience.
Do you really believe it's alright to claim that people are wrong without proving it and expect everyone to take your words for granted? If it is so, I'm afraid you need to grow up a bit.
If you upscale a 320x240 image to 640x480, the amount of information in the image has not increased at all. The number of pixels has quadrupled, and the in-between pixels may have been interpolated from the original pixels, but the amount of information conveyed by them has not increased.
Yes it has. Now you're not just storing the information about original pixels, you're also storing the information about interpolated pixels. The amount of useful information has not increased, but there's redundant information now, which also has to be stored. The only reason it doesn't require proportionally higher bitrate is that the information density is lower now. (Similarly, downscaling a picture to 1/4 of its resolution will commonly require a higher bitrate than original/4.)
Warp wrote:
Even with lossless compression methods you could compress the resulting 640x480 image into the same size as you could compress the original 320x240 image (because, once again, the upscaled image has no additional information compared to the original). You just have to choose the compression technique appropriately.
May I require an example, together with resulting video files? That will alleviate all the possible confusion (and don't you dare cop out after starting this debate).
Warp wrote:
Additionally, mpeg4 searches for shapes in the video to be compressed. If these shapes are represented by vectors, the scale of the shapes doesn't matter.
It's searching for shapes in raster image. Because the image is still raster, not vector graphics. They are absolutely incomparable in efficiency, speed, compression ratio, scaling quality, everything, and no matter how advanced motion recognition algorithms are, they won't ever be close to actual vector graphics.
Warp, what you're talking about might not be a quality increase due to upscaling, but a quality decrease due to improper stretching of a downscaled video to fullscreen. If you use common sense you'll see that 320x240=76800, while 640x480=307200 pixels, which is 4 times more pixels shown on each frame of a video. No, of course it doesn't explicitly tell that such a video will necessarily consume four times more bitrate, it just means the codec has to compress 4 times as much data overall. There's no way it's going to be more efficient than otherwise, regardless of your experience. Math doesn't work on personal level.
Now there are multiple ways of upscaling a low resolution video on decoding level, which may or may not look better than using an encoding filter to upscale one.
It's very cool of you, actually.
By the way, what would you think about doing a glitchless S3&K run with Sonic solo? That kind of run has been in high demand since who knows when, but Upthorn isn't up for it.
I don't like the fact that a russian writes a better "paper" in english than an american.
I would have written it even better had I proofread the result once more. There are a few typoes here and there, as well as a couple things that could be worded differently.
But hey, thanks. :D
Following the recent upsurge in emulator development, there are some interesting news on the PS2 front as well: apparently, development teams of the two most advanced PS2 emulators have merged to form one solid program, which will assume the name PCSX2.
If you check the compatibility list on their site, you'll note how many various games are already playable using the recent versions. In fact, it is not unlikely that we receive tool-enhanced PCSX2 already in 2009 if we ask nicely. (AngerFist? :D )
All in all, it seems the 2009 is going to be a floodgate opening year for tool-assisted speedrun platforms, kinds of like 2004 has been.
[EDIT]
So, AngerFist convinced me to create a feature request on the project's googlecode page. Which means you can go ahead and star it:
http://code.google.com/p/pcsx2/issues/detail?id=16
Personally, this looks like the kind of game I would get tired of pretty quickly. It looks like a game I would enjoy for about 5 minutes and then go "Wait, is the game gonna be like that the entire time?"
Thankfully, it only continues for less than 4 more minutes.
Halamantariel wrote:
To support Comicalflop, I totally disagree that this game is superior to Mischief Makers. They're different in too many ways to even compare them together. This game is the same thing right to the end (hack and slash), while Mischief Makers is more of a platformer.
I'm not attacking Comicalflop, and thus not sure why you even need to support him in the first place. Also, are you arguing the entertainment value I derive from different games? Just don't.
Lastly, the notion of Mischief Makers as "more of a platformer" is rather ironic in the light of the amount of time actually spent interacting with, you know, platforms (rather than just sliding right, flying over obstacles altogether, or doing some unrelated things).
Tough luck. :)
Don't blame me for your game choices, though; you know I prefer seeing entertainment to length ratio very high in any TAS, regardless of my possible warm feelings toward the game, the author, or anything else like that.
You know, this is the kind of nearly-non-stop action that I was looking for in games like Spider-man 3 and Mischief Makers. Basically, it's Gunstar Super Heroes with all the boring stuff cut out. Great game, and a great TAS. 8.5 for entertainment.
As much as I'd like to see an empty workbench, I beg you: do not hastily accept movies. History has seen many cases (several of them with Aqfaq's submissions, no less!), when an improvement is found shortly after the submission, leading to unpleasant "d'oh" moments which could have been avoided with a day's worth of waiting. This is as good a time to start learning on the past mistakes as any.
I believe orbs are friendly transporters who carry the reinforcements for the main hero. :) IIRC, shooting them has so far been allowed in all pacifist runs.
What's the current consensus on CD reader plugins? I've been somewhat out of the loop so I'm not entirely sure it's currently warranted, but SaPu just released version 1.3 of his plugin together with the source. I think it's supposed to be good, and the fact that it's open-source is also good. Opinions/tests/anything?
Another thought would be to weight peoples ratings based on their average rating. So if someone rated all 10's, then a 10 is an average rating and would be weighted as a 5.
Then the average rating would truly reflect which movies people thought were awesome.
I say this idea is very good. Moreso, it should have been implemented since the start, since it apparently fixes the inflation problem very efficiently. People will have to give out lower ratings to make their high votes more significant; at the same time, people who already utilize a good spread of votes in their rating won't have to worry about anything. BUT! There is always a possible backlash of crappy voters go and rate any old, bad, or otherwise non-significant submissions with 0/0 just to make the other votes count. I could say I'm sure it's still better than what we have now, though, but that's just me. I can't tell if it will actually be better yet.
Not necessarily. The Mega Man 1 movie was encoded with a script (or something) that made the Magnet Beam appear more solid. In other words, better. It's OK because the original input file is still available and can be verified by anyone.
More like, it was an exception that happened purely because Bisqwit likes Megaman. ;) We don't see that happening in every other game which has flickering or wobbling, even though that would greatly benefit the relevant TASes.
We still don't chop off parts of the game screen, either, because it makes the video lose information (compared to beam solidifier, which was a gain in information, albeit recundant from the game's position), which doesn't really make anything "better". As ZeXr0 said, both DS screens should always be recorded unless one of them is blank. Only in that case information loss is averted.
