Posted: 5/2/2009 10:24 PM
(Edited: 5/3/2009 10:46 AM)
Post subject: Obsoleted movies: Torrent availability, good or bad idea?
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Bisqwit
Editor, Active player (296)
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Whenever a movie is published on this site and it obsoleted an older movie, I usually make the old torrent unavailable and make it be indicated on the bittorrent as "the requested download is not authorized on this site". I'm asking for your opinions, which way should we do? Option 1: Remove old torrents Pros: Attempts to download old movies will give (some kind of) indication that it's no longer a valid movie, as it has been obsoleted Cons: History is erased. Bad for archivalists. Option 2: Don't remove old torrents Pros: History is kept. Archivalists rejoice. Cons: Those who run some kind of seed-on-demand scripts such as btfriend will find it hard to get rid of old movies and to control the disk space used. Disk space is used for many, many obsolete movies.
Posted: 5/2/2009 10:29 PM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
How about selective keeping of "historically significant" old movies? If someone improves his own movie by a couple of seconds, without changing it significantly, there's usually not much interest for the old movie. When the obsoleting movie is significantly different from the old one, then there may be interest in keeping the old one available as well (a good example of this being the 16-star vs. 1-star vs. 0-star SuperMario64 completion). Of course this process cannot be automatized, so it would increase slightly the amount of work needed.
Posted: 5/2/2009 10:37 PM
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ShinyDoofy
Former player
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 716
I don't know about the tracker software used, but I'd support Warp's idea. As for the work needed, a checkbox saying "keep old torrent" or the like would shift that work load to the publishers.
Posted: 5/2/2009 10:48 PM
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Mitjitsu
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TAS of 2007 N64 TAS of 2007
As Warp said, I can only agree with keeping historically significant movies.
Posted: 5/2/2009 11:02 PM
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Bisqwit
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Are there some historically significant movies for which a torrent has not been kept? I have tried to follow this guideline, though I didn't mention it in the opening post.
Posted: 5/2/2009 11:02 PM
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Derakon
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
Yeah, that sounds like a good compromise. I can only imagine the amount of disk space used by all 1283 movies the site has ever published (assuming they all got encodes).
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Posted: 5/2/2009 11:23 PM
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Blublu
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Joined: 3/11/2004
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That seems right to me too. The movies are all being kept as input files anyway, right? So if one really desperately needed some old obscure movie, he/she could always encode them again. No history is lost at all, though it's kept in an inconvenient format. Hmm. Is it possible to make the bittorrent tracker give some kind of "warning: this movie is obsolete, go get the new movie" without disallowing it completely? If so, I think that could be looked into.
Posted: 5/2/2009 11:50 PM
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BigBoct
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Derakon wrote:
Yeah, that sounds like a good compromise. I can only imagine the amount of disk space used by all 1283 movies the site has ever published (assuming they all got encodes).
I know of two that didn't; Jackic's Gunstar Heroes 1-player Normal run, and Cpadolf's first Super Metroid any% in-game run.
Previous Name: boct1584
Posted: 5/3/2009 8:08 AM
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Warp
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Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
If keeping "historically relevant" obsoleted movies downloadable is implemented and made official, then it might be a good idea to indicate this somehow in those movies in questions. Now obsoleted movies are listed with a "(obsoleted)" attached. Maybe for those which are obsoleted but still available for download, change it to something else which would indicate this? (Hmm, what would be a good indicator? "(obsoleted but available)"? "(obsoleted but downloadable)"? Hmm, everything I can think of sounds bad. Any ideas?) It may also be a good idea to restore some of the obsoleted videos which aren't currently available.
Posted: 5/3/2009 8:58 AM
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Dada
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
It's not very practical to keep videos of old, obsolete versions around. It would either take a massive amount of disk space or require those who are interested to keep seeding the runs forever. You would end up with a lot of dead torrents. I think we should be doing more with sites like the Internet Archive. A mirror on that site would work very well for the few historical movies that we really want to preserve.
Posted: 5/3/2009 8:59 AM
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Bisqwit
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Solon wrote:
I know of two that didn't; Jackic's Gunstar Heroes 1-player Normal run, and Cpadolf's first Super Metroid any% in-game run.
Give me torrent filenames, or at the very least, link to the published movie page, and I'll restore them.
Posted: 5/3/2009 9:09 AM
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Sir_VG
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Give me torrent filenames, or at the very least, link to the published movie page, and I'll restore them.
No, those are movies that didn't get published, PERIOD. Gunstar Heroes wasn't published because 'it was too pretty, and video codecs [at the time] didn't handle the encoding very well'. Don't know why the other one wasn't. Anyways, as for me, I like the idea of #2. There are some movies (like the original 'best ending' Gimmick run that I like better then the current run. But instead of torrents, how about uploading to Archive.org instead and doing torrent for the historically awesome ones?
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Posted: 5/3/2009 10:44 AM
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Highness
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Joined: 8/24/2004
Posts: 2562
Location: Sweden
Voted to keep old torrents.
Posted: 5/3/2009 11:41 AM
(Edited: 5/3/2009 12:05 PM)
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nineko
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Joined: 8/2/2008
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Voted to remove torrents. edit per Warp below: When I pointed out that some people can't download torrents, offering to make mirrors, I've been told that the main purpose of this site is to share input files, so any determined users can download them with the proper emulator and watch the movies by himself, and that the AVI files are just candy offered as a bonus for the ones who don't want or simply can't set up the emulators to run. Older movies can still be seen through the input file if one really wants too, and really interesting/innovative movies usually got one or more mirrors (sometimes even on Youtube), and those are staying. Besides, people like me and (mainly) ZeXr0 have been mass-uploading AVI files on archive.org, so there's an even higher amount of mirrors even for movies which aren't top class either. Keeping the torrents up, while they've never been in the past, may lead to confusion toward users who were used to see the error message for obsoleted movies, but it will also affect the behaviour of Bisqwit's bot that automatically seeds dead torrents: by using its bandwidth for obsoleted movies you make it harder for people to get the not-obsoleted one. So yeah, this is why I voted a strong no about this.
Gone.
Posted: 5/3/2009 11:43 AM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
Highness wrote:
Voted to keep old torrents.
nineko wrote:
Voted to remove torrents.
Ok, I know I'm going to sound like a dick, but why are you voting twice? We already can see the votes using the "view results" button. Why put your vote in two places? If you had at least explained why you made that vote, then that would make more sense.
Posted: 5/3/2009 12:09 PM
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Kles
Joined: 7/28/2005
Posts: 339
I think that torrents of particular historical significant, as well as runs which are obsoleted by radically different techniques (note: not routes!), such as Super Mario 64 low%, or, a theoretical "Maxim version" run of Harmony of Dissonance being obsoleted by whoever made the warping version (Comicalflop?) should be kept available. This is also subjective. Not that any judgment is really objective here, right? :) edit: god damn I should really pay more attention when I post
Posted: 5/3/2009 4:13 PM
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Rick
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Location: Maine
I think I agree with the keeping around "historically-significant" TASes. Heck, maybe a section made visible would even be a nice add-on to the list of movies. It's not something I've done often, but I've gone back and downloaded some old TASes before to show friends and just watch for enjoyment.
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Posted: 5/3/2009 4:19 PM
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nineko
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Joined: 8/2/2008
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I kept some old AVIs as well, like the 16 stars TAS of Super Mario 64, because it's different enough from the 0 stars one to deserve a place on my hard drives. But this didn't prevent me from voting no. Either way, I already commented twice, so I'll abstain from commenting further in this thread unless asked explicitly, I don't like to repeat myself.
Gone.
Posted: 5/3/2009 5:00 PM
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Whelkman
Joined: 7/7/2007
Posts: 161
I manage my videos through uTorrent, so old stuff I want to keep remains. Examples with reasons:
  • zggzdydp's Castlevania AAS: new version "too glitchy"
  • AKA and Swordless Link's Super Mario 64 16 stars: don't think the debate on this one will ever end
  • genisto's Arkanoid warpless: different enough stylistically from Baxter's to warrant keeping
Also, if I still had the torrent link, Morimoto's original Rockman would be on there. That's the movie that got me into the TAS world.
Posted: 5/4/2009 7:29 PM
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alden
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Joined: 2/11/2007
Posts: 1522
These: http://tasvideos.org/Alden/GoldenOldies.html Though it should be expanded quite a bit :) Also JXQ's old SM 100% run with the fancy input display animations.
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Posted: 5/13/2009 10:55 PM
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BigBoct
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Bisqwit wrote:
Solon wrote:
I know of two that didn't; Jackic's Gunstar Heroes 1-player Normal run, and Cpadolf's first Super Metroid any% in-game run.
Give me torrent filenames, or at the very least, link to the published movie page, and I'll restore them.
I meant that those two movies never had encodes.
Previous Name: boct1584
Posted: 6/9/2009 9:08 AM
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Bisqwit
Editor, Active player (296)
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Very well, will keep the manner of operation on the tracker files that has been exercised until now. I.e. old torrents are occasionally removed manually, sparing those that are somehow of sentimental value. :)