Post by TNSe

Posted: 1/16/2007 7:24 PM

Post subject: Requesting consistency of encoded movies

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AngerFist

Active player (433)

Joined: 4/21/2004
Posts: 3517
Location: Stockholm, Sweden

This has bothered me for a while now. Im gonna take for granted that most people here prefer quality before quantity, which means that if you'd crank the bitrate a bit more to achieve better and less blurry result, you are in favor of quality encoded version and care a bit less about the filesize. If the encoders are encouraged to consider more about the filesize than a higher filesize quality version, can we reach a decision to be in favor of quality? For reference, I'll use a few movies to prove my point. Lets be a bit egoistic and talk about my Mega Man 4 movie. Bisqwit encoded mine and DeHackEd's movie but one thing that really bothered me was the color of the platform in Pharaoh Man. I think it's wrong and DeHackEd encoded another version which focused on eliminating that issue and bringing forth the true colors of the game which he did and I thank him greatly for that. Another example is this one: Castlevania3j-tas-alucard-Samhaingrim.avi. Bisqwit, we all love you and sincerely appreciate all the work you've put for your site and you know I now and then applaud and congratulate you on your successful encoded runs, but to be honest, the background was heavily blurry and bad. Same thing with Baxters Mega Man 5 run , the background is significantly bad. Im 100% sure there are other examples. What I wish for is consistency between each encoded run; a high quality encoded run and by doing this, I dont think the filesize would increase so much that you'd prefer to keep a low filesize, at least not with the Mega Man 4 example.

Nitrogenesis wrote:

Guys I come from the DidyKnogRacist communite, and you are all wrong, tihs is the run of the mileniun and everyone who says otherwise dosnt know any bater! I found this run vary ease to masturbate too!!!! Don't fuck with me, I know this game so that mean I'm always right!StupedfackincommunityTASVideoz!!!!!!

Arc wrote:

I enjoyed this movie in which hands firmly gripping a shaft lead to balls deep in multiple holes.

natt wrote:

I don't want to get involved in this discussion, but as a point of fact C# is literally the first goddamn thing on that fucking page you linked did you even fucking read it

Cooljay wrote:

Mayor Haggar and Cody are such nice people for the community. Metro City's hospitals reached an all time new record of incoming patients due to their great efforts :P

Posted: 1/16/2007 7:38 PM

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DeHackEd

Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Former player

Joined: 11/6/2004
Posts: 833

The NES is a palette based system. There's only ~64 colours to choose from. The selection varies by emulator, and FCEU supports more than one built-in, plus you can choose to load an external palette. Just to make things a little more annoying, fceu has a habbit of saving command-line parameters, so selecting an external palette becomes the default until changed (or the file is deleted from under it). That accounts for the colour change. As for encoding quality, each encoder is different. I have my idea of good quality (though I'll let it slip if the bitrate gets too high). Bisqwit's idea of a fair tradeoff is probably different. If you want, I'll use MPEG4 next time. That way Bisqwit's AVIs will be better.

Posted: 1/16/2007 7:57 PM

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Baxter

Skilled player (1402)

Joined: 5/31/2004
Posts: 1821

The thing which bothered me lately was the warped arkanoid encode. feitclub tried everything to get the mkv to work, but (I think) he didn't succeed. I think it's too bad when people want to watch a certain movie and aren't able to. I know mkv's are as good as avi's and I have no problems watching them (although my vlc player did give some graphical glitches... media player classic played it fine)... but for some unexplained reason I like avi's better. I can imagine there are some people who don't even know what an mkv is.

http://tasvideos.org/Baxter.html

Posted: 1/16/2007 8:30 PM

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moozooh

Senior Moderator

Joined: 8/4/2005
Posts: 5770
Location: Away

Baxter wrote:

I can imagine there are some people who don't even know what an mkv is.

I'd imagine most of those people not knowing what H.264 is, either, that's why we have this page.

Warp wrote:

Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.

Posted: 1/16/2007 8:37 PM

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Bisqwit

Editor, Active player (296)

Joined: 3/8/2004
Posts: 7469
Location: Arzareth

DeHackEd wrote:

The NES is a palette based system. There's only ~64 colours to choose from. The selection varies by emulator

And different opinions exist on which palette is closest to original. I use the one which I feel that it's best I've seen. Obviously AngerFist's opinion differs.

Posted: 1/16/2007 8:38 PM

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Zurreco

Former player

Joined: 8/1/2004
Posts: 2687
Location: Seattle, WA

I think that the quality between each of the avis is good enough that I've never once noticed any of these problems. The great thing about this site is that if someone doesn't like the avi quality, they can always just get the ROM and watch a lossless replay. Don't misconstrue that and think that I'm saying "avis are good enough and if you don't like it don't watch em," though: at some point avis must pass some sort of minimum quality. That being said, I don't think any of the files are in such a shape that they would need to be re-encoded. However, I would love it if encoders would run their movies by a few people so that we can catch any typos or lack of text things in the movie files. This is partly because of when Phil misspelled my name in the Nosferatu video, but also because of a recent few movie files (like the Jaws movie, which beats the game in 13.33.13 apparently).

hi nitrodon streamline: cyn-chine

Posted: 1/16/2007 9:28 PM

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ZeXr0

Joined: 8/27/2006
Posts: 883

I know it's hard to maintain and it's a lot of work, but isn't it possible to encode a high quality version and a low quality ? If the file size really differ, I think it would be a good thing, like SDA which have a couple of encoded movie, some of which are high quality, other low quality.

Posted: 1/16/2007 9:34 PM

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Zurreco

Former player

Joined: 8/1/2004
Posts: 2687
Location: Seattle, WA

ZeXr0 wrote:

but isn't it possible to encode a high quality version and a low quality?

It's possible, sure, but it's also not necessary. You do realize that what we publish here is currently the SDA standard for high quality, right?

hi nitrodon streamline: cyn-chine

Posted: 1/16/2007 9:37 PM

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moozooh

Senior Moderator

Joined: 8/4/2005
Posts: 5770
Location: Away

SDA offers various sizes mainly because there's both no way to satisfy everyone with just one encode and no way of doing a manual encode, either. However, you can do the latter with TAS movies if you want to, and with very little trouble. If you can't or don't want to, the quality/size ratio can hardly be better with TASVideos encodes. Not to mention that every SDA encode is bloated so much that it's almost painful to try to stuff some of the high/insane quality runs onto DVD+Rs.

Warp wrote:

Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.

Posted: 1/16/2007 9:47 PM

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Tub

Joined: 6/25/2005
Posts: 1377

different quality releases won't really help here due to the usage of BitTorrent for distribution. There'd probably be seeding trouble and lower download rates when the available seeders are split between different quality avis.

m00

Posted: 1/16/2007 9:51 PM

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moozooh

Senior Moderator

Joined: 8/4/2005
Posts: 5770
Location: Away

Tub wrote:

different quality releases won't really help here due to the usage of BitTorrent for distribution. There'd probably be seeding trouble and lower download rates when the available seeders are split between different quality avis.

We can use archive.org for direct links as SDA does, too, but nothing can match BT's speed when there are a couple of Swedes with 100 mbit upload rate. :D

Warp wrote:

Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.

Posted: 1/17/2007 9:12 AM

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Xkeeper

Banned User, Former player

Joined: 12/23/2004
Posts: 1850

100Mb upload? :( We only have 6Mb down... But yes, try and find a good standard for movies, and for god's sake double-check the movie text. D:

Perma-banned

Posted: 1/18/2007 3:19 PM

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Baxter

Skilled player (1402)

Joined: 5/31/2004
Posts: 1821

It might be a little off-topic... But the text with the author's name, the length of the movie, and the amount of rerecords. If it doesn't really obstruct the gameplay of the movie, I wouldn't mind if it this was showed up a little longer. I often find myself having to go back in the movie, and pause the movie to read this info.

http://tasvideos.org/Baxter.html

Posted: 1/18/2007 3:26 PM

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Nach

Emulator Coder

Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers

Baxter I know what you mean. However, sometimes it's hard to keep it up in too long in one spot without blocking anything. I know in some of my encodes, I have to make several attempts to find an optimal place to place the messages.

Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.

Posted: 1/18/2007 7:36 PM

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Warp

Banned User, Former player

Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland

Btw, some times (poor) image quality is not so much a question of opinion, as it is a question of the contents of the video being really pathological for mpeg4. There is certain type of content which mpeg4 just can't handle very well, and it will look bad no matter how large the bitrate is.