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Here's an example of a pack where even less scrambling happens than it does in the one you linked to:
https://files.tasvideos.org/bisqwit/oldpacks/b46d711.png
Here duplicate tiles are simply removed but the overall shape of the screenshot is still the same.
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qFox wrote:
btw, it also seems to me like the algorithm can be optimized even further by reducing the white tiles as much as possible. There are probably a lot of single tiles that are never used in conjunction with another tile. There's no need for those tiles to be "near" the other tiles from that game. Same for a certain disjoint group of tiles. Like in https://files.tasvideos.org/packs/6a4ad3f.png you can clearly see that some parts of that image can be reduced. Dunno how much that will improve the filesize though.
By "whites" I presume you are talking about the transparent regions.
This is somewhat intentional though. I realize I could obfuscate it further, but I wanted to keep the data associated for an individual screenshot in a group (except when multiple screenshots share same tiles). The $scramble variable controls how much scrambling happens for the individual components of each image and where they are placed.
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qFox wrote:
So how do you actually compare the tiles? I can't really follow that part on that page. Get the data for some tile and compare it to all other tiles? Or maybe something like a hash to speed up comparisons...
The code converts the list of pixel values in a tile region into a string and then calculates a crc32 of that string.
Those crc32 values are used to compare tiles.
As such, it is not as versatile as e.g. motion detection algorithms in x264. It can only find identical matches from a tile-aligned grid.
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I will disable this feature for the time being.
Although its summaries are fun to read, they seem to harm more than help.
I intended it for helping the quick perusal on which forum posts one would be interested in replying to, but such opportunities are a little too rare compared to the amount of text it spews on the channel.
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petrie911 wrote:
So how does this handle very long posts? Does it just ignore posts longer than X number of words, or will it actually try to summarize some gigantic block of text?
It parses sentences from the beginning until the generated length exceeds 200 characters.
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I changed some nomenclature on the site.
People who used to be "publishers", are now SUPERJUDGES, for they embody the privileges of judges and publishers at the same time.
"Halfpublishers" have been promoted to PUBLISHERS.
This should make things easier to understand, easier to document, and sound more happy and optimistic alltogether.
More information: http://tasvideos.org/Users.html
It ignores words that don't seem to help comprising a proper sentence.
The first parsing means "the posts separate some thread" (wherein "separate" is a verb), and the second parsing means "moved posts separate some thread" (wherein "moved" is an participle, i.e. "posts that have moved").
But, if I add the subject, "I":
linkparser> Found 2 linkages (2 had no P.P. violations) Linkage 1, cost vector = (UNUSED=0 DIS=0 AND=0 LEN=14)
The first parse tree conveys the (intended) meaning, "I moved the posts, with a separate thread as a target for the posts".
The second parse tree, I think, conveys the meaning "I moved the posts, and those posts love the 'a separate thread' concept".
(Demonstrating how significant a difference can be caused by the lack of a subject.)
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petrie911 wrote:
That sounds...really awesome. Is there any way we can see the AutoSummary of a post, perhaps when previewing it?
I'll consider it (should this become a permanent feature instead of just a moment's toy), but currently they are only echoed on the IRC channel whenever one posts / edits a post.
For this post, we got:
1342#nesvideos@NesVideoAgent New reply by Bisqwit (OT: test): http://tasvideos.org/forum/p/182516#182516 (Re: AutoSummary explained) -- AutoSummary: I should become something of a toy. They are echoed whenever one edits a post.
1342#nesvideos.gocha :o
1343#nesvideos.Bisqwit Hahah
1343#nesvideos.Upthorn hahahaha
1345#nesvideos.Bisqwit Somehow it reminds me of the propagandists' news interview editing :P
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Ferret Warlord wrote:
It appears to be a dialect of lolcat. I'll see what I can do about it.
"Please recolor the Skype icon."
Thanks for the translation. Why should I recolor the Skype icon?
Ferret Warlord wrote:
I have some questions:
1. What is this feature you were testing?
2. Did it work?
I was testing the AutoSummary feature.
AutoSummary is a feature I wrote for the forums. It parses each sentence of the written post into a tree format, using Link-Parser. Then it follows the longest path through that parse tree and generates a shortened sentence using words only found on that longest path. The result makes an "AutoSummary" of the post. That summary is then shown on the IRC channel along with the reply notification.
For example, Moozooh's post over here was AutoSummarized as: "Try interpolation. That 'll give sound you are looking for."
The original post was: "Try 32 KHz sound frequency + gaussian interpolation. That'll give you that warm sound you're looking for."
It is a rather complex mechanism considering that all it does is that it removes words from the sentence and posts them. But the grammatical analysis is required there to avoid removing important bits like predicates or prepositions that would make the sentence completely unintelligible.
(Of course, it still manages to create unintelligible summaries, both because people write bad grammar and because the parser understands a small subset of English grammar…)
Of course #2, the important bits of a message aren't necessarily in the grammatical structure. In the case of Moozooh's post I quoted above, a more relevant summary would be "Try 32 kHz sound frequency + gaussian interpolation". But making _that_ work in the general case is beyond my AI programming skills…
Maybe if I made it simply list all nouns of the post ;) Then it would become: "32 kHz sound frequency. Gaussian interpolation. Warm sound."
But then this post would be "Translation. Skype icon. The AutoSummary feature. AutoSummary. A feature. The forums. Each sentence. The written post. A tree." or something like that, not very good.
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alden wrote:
Cool ... any way to quantify how much is shared? It would be neat to see the ones that share the most :D
It is rather volatile data. Sure, there's a way to quantify it by looking at the database contents... Compare the image entries that use the same file, and find a pair where the largest number of matching coordinates are found.
Here's a SQL dump. http://bisqwit.iki.fi/kala/imgsizecachedump.sql.gz
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Warp wrote:
I find it somewhat ironic that the very first feedback of the new voting UI is that it must be buggy because now there are two dropdown menus... :P
Does anyone have any suggestion about how to make it clearer that the first dropdown menu is the integer part and the second one the decimal part of the rating?
Could it perchance use the same rating engine as on the forums?
It's forumsubmissionvoting.php. If you'd like to create a common module that would implement both the forum and site submission votings at once, it'd be nice...
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For the technically inclined, here's what happens at the software level.
Each time someone accesses pages at TASVideos, the site logs the list of images rendered on that particular access.
Once in a while, a certain script is run on the server. The script analyzes the log, and figures out which images are often loaded together. It takes those images in groups of ten to fourty, and passes them to an image tiling algorithm. This algorithm attempts to create an image that contains all of details of those individual images, but does so by merging identical details, such that the same graphical detail is stored only once. Finally, it outputs a list of X and Y coordinates where each individual tile of each of the source images can be found in that composed image, "superimage". Those lists are saved in the database, along with the cached information of the original image such as the vertical and horizontal resolutions.
Finally, when the site renders images, it checks the image cache to see if there's information about the image there. If the resolutions are specified there, it adds them to the image tag (to make pages load smoother), and if there is a superimage name and the X & Y coordinate lists, it composes a HTML table which reconstructs the image using those pieces from the superimage.
It's likely another one of those preg crashes that PHP suffers of rather frequently ― ones that leave no trace whatsoever in an error log.
I don't know why it surfaced now and on that page in particular, and I have no idea how to fix it. But trust me, I'll try to figure it out…
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The reason why I did this change is manyfold:
P1) It invokes less HTTP accesses, because many images are loaded from a single file.
P2) It causes faster image loading times; once a file is loaded, everything that is generated using that file, is rendered instantenously. And since multiple imageries are stored in a single file, it compresses slightly better too. This kind of practice is already commonly recommended in website design. For example, all the graphics at Youtube are generated from a single file.
P3) It was fun creating that image packing algorithm and watching how many screenshots are stored in a single file. For example, this file contains all screenshots of SMB movies, obsoleted and current alltogether.
P4) It discourages people hotlinking to images stored on my servers.
I realize there are negative consequences as well:
M1) The HTML tables required to render the image properly are rather large. I optimized them as well as I could, even going so far as to utilize the table background color to avoid image masks, but they're still quite verbose.
M2) Browser bugs may cause wrong renderings. I verified this using Firefox 3, Google Chrome, IE 7 and Opera 9.52, and it worked perfectly with all of those, so it seems fairly compatible.
M3) Bugs in the composition engine itself may cause wrong renderings. That seems to be the case with both of the screenshots that Xkeeper shows.
I realize I could discard the tilemapping algorithm and just embed all images as-is in a single file, but that would invalidate points P3 and P4 from this post. :(
I'll research the bug that causes that "TRA COOL" part to appear. It seems to be the background color optimization mentioned in M1, but I need to figure out why. The Pidgey bug had another cause and has been fixed.
Xkeeper wrote:
I love how things that were working perfectly before are now broken.
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If the first second is a trouble for you, use the zones setting to force a particular quantizer for a particular region of the movie.
That way, you can give a low quantizer (i.e. high bitrate) for the intro, while everything else is, say, 300 kbit/s by average.
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Ramzi wrote:
Answer my questions!
Sorry, but I have been quite busy last week, and I want to have proper time to think and reply to jimsfriend's post ― and I think it wouldn't do justice to reply to others while ignoring his post.
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evilchen wrote:
http://s4.tinypic.com/bm95.jpg
this is on the right side of tasvideos.org (at least for me?) as you can see on the picture the normal site is far far to the left..
It might help if you copypasted the entire SQL clause as text instead of showing a screenshot of a few words of it.
Thanks for the thought, anyway…
