Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Going to try making an AVI of this now.
edit: AVI is recording now :) Will try to do a high quality encode for Youtube. Too bad Chrono Trigger is still uploading and I can't start on this one until it's done.
edit: I have to redo the encode. :( Turns out setting PCSX to max FPS while recording works fine for normal scenes but not for the MDECs/FMVs, they get recorded way too fast. Kind of weird that the official guide says you should do this.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
We will be working to automatically migrate your Google Videos to YouTube. [...] To do this, you’ll need to have a YouTube account associated with your Google Video account (you can create one here).
That's strange, how would they automatically move all of their content over to Youtube when some of the accounts used to upload them are Google-only? Maybe those videos will be removed after all.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
DarkKobold wrote:
Dada wrote:
Second of all COPPA has basically never been enforced on non-commercial websites. In fact it has rarely been enforced at all. That's because it's pretty much impossible to enforce except on extremely high-profile websites. You talk about how we're supposed to live "in the real world", but in the real world COPPA is almost null and void.
So we should break a law, because it has rarely been enforced? Just because it hasn't doesn't mean it won't.
It's generally understood that we're not breaking the law because it has never been proven or tested in court that sites like this one apply to COPPA. Have you ever heard of a site who got taken down because of this? Ever? So, even though this has never happened, has never been an issue and has never troubled anybody, supposedly we should preemptively prevent certain people from having access to this site just in case. You know, "to be on the safe side".
No, sorry dude, but this just doesn't make sense. You don't prevent people from accessing a site because of some law that doesn't apply to us and never gets enforced anyway.
Hey, the legality of x264 has been contested because it's an implementation of the patent protected H.264 standard. Those are patents that have actually been enforced in the past. Should we stop encoding our movies using x264 for that reason? Hey, it's never been enforced on that level before, but let's be on the safe side, right?
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
DarkKobold wrote:
Actually, after reading the Wikipedia page on COPPA, I feel that we should go further, not less. The idea, (at least, to me), isn't to protect Patryk, that is the job of his parents. The job is to protect the website from lawsuits.
[...]
Thus, we have heavy-handed actions to deal with things we perceive that could cause the end the site. Yes, in fairy tale land we'd stand up for truth and justice... but, this is the real world.
This is so wrong I can't even imagine you read so little as the Wikipedia page. Okay first of all COPPA is interpreted as allowing the dissemination of pictures of children, as long as those pictures do not show a child in a "vulnerable situation" such as a hospital, and do not divulge any identifiable information.
Second of all COPPA has basically never been enforced on non-commercial websites. In fact it has rarely been enforced at all. That's because it's pretty much impossible to enforce except on extremely high-profile websites. You talk about how we're supposed to live "in the real world", but in the real world COPPA is almost null and void.
DarkKobold wrote:
Thus, we have heavy-handed actions to deal with things we perceive that could cause the end the site.
Could we please stop with the paranoia?
edit:
DarkKobold wrote:
Actually, after reading the COPPA law, I'm tempted to remove the information about his location from his profile. (Which, combined with his picture, makes it more identifiable.)
Yes, all I need to do now is find a child who lives in Poland. That is where he lives, right? Great, I'll have found him in no time.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
moozooh wrote:
but then again I can't speak for anybody else either, regardless of the age.
Yeah I'd just like to stress here that I'm not speaking out on behalf of anybody, and certainly not the poster whose picture was removed. I'm speaking out because I don't agree with this decision for a number of reasons, and I think that the people who moderate our forums, who have the power and the ability to overrule us regular members, should be properly scrutinized as a responsibility of having that power.
Whether or not Patryk1023 agrees or disagrees with the decision is not relevant to that discussion, and it's something that he should take up with Brushy himself.
That said, let's talk about it. Supposedly the reason to remove that picture was because a young member probably does not understand privacy and therefore should not be allowed to post pictures of himself. It should be noted here that, even if you take the COPPA law as an example, which is the controversial and rarely enforced US federal law that applies to this exact situation, pictures are part of a so-called "sliding scale" of how likely something constitutes a privacy violation. It is interpreted as stating that pictures of children can be disseminated as long as there is no identifiable information contained in the picture and they are taken at public places. The picture that was posted (I saw it before it got taken down) applies to this perfectly.
So even by the most rigid standard of paranoid US federal law, this picture does not constitute a privacy breach. Indeed, it might as well have been any picture of any person. There's nothing that actually links the picture to any specific person.
But what bothers me the most is the idea that some individual moderator believes he knows what's best for a specific person and unilaterally decides to act based on that belief. He didn't ask in advance. He didn't talk to him in advance. Supposedly there was some kind of urgency to remove the image, as if millions of pedophiles were just waiting to pound on the opportunity to look at a completely generic and unidentifiable image of a minor. This is pure grandeur on Brushy's part.
Now I should state that I don't have anything against Brushy. In fact, I think he's a cool guy. We've talked on IRC and we've exchanged posts. This is not a personal issue that I have with him, nor should it be interpreted as such. He made some decisions in the past that I disagreed with. Don't forget that the last controversial action he took was locking a topic saying "there's no need for this" after he himself had just started that exact same type of topic.
I've always thought that moderators should do nothing except forum housekeeping, guiding the discussion, and taking action only if absolutely necessary. The concept of giving a moderator's opinion more weight than that of other members is inherently wrong, because they're just like us. They're not special. People become moderators mostly by being active and willing to put some time into keeping things running. Yet moderators keep abusing their privileges by enforcing their personal opinions onto people. Whether it be in the form of locking someone's topic that was technically in the right place and nobody was bothered by or even complained about, or removing a picture because it is his personal opinion that the poster doesn't know what he's doing. This is wrong, and it should be properly scrutinized.
tl;dr nobody's going to read this post because it's ridiculously long already, but basically it comes down to this: the reason why so many moderators are bad (and the vast majority are) is simply because they do more than is required, yet there's no recourse whenever they decide on something. Brushy's action here lacked any kind of logical rationale, did nothing to help anyone and probably did more harm to Patryk1023's self-esteem than anything else. And it was conceived on the notion of valiantly defending him against the dangers of the world, which can only be described as paranoia married to delusions of grandeur.
Nach wrote:
Regardless of that, no matter how paranoid you are, you aren't paranoid enough.
Nach wrote:
Just be happy we allow him to speak at all.
I am sincerely disappointed that someone so coldly irrational could be the supreme authority of this website.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
DarkKobold wrote:
(US law, minors can't give consent for... anything).
That is a pretty slippery slope considering if you're going to comply with COPPA, you need to get parental permission to even allow people under 13 to use the site. No forum that I've ever seen actually complies with this aside from maybe forcing people to click on the "I am 14 or older" button in the registration form (if you click the other button, they'll simply tell you you can't register in order to avoid the paperwork). In practice, this only applies to commercial websites and to my knowledge it has never been enforced on a small non-commercial website like this one.
PS: photos were never explicitly part of COPPA and the general consensus is that they don't apply. See the quote under "privacy and permissions" at http://www.cic.edu/teach21/t21_website/ep/guided_tour/dialogue.html
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Okay, so which moderator removed Patryk1023's picture? Because I'd like to tell him to his face that this is an incredibly dumb thing to do.
Honestly? You think you can protect some guy from the DANGERS OF THE WORLD by removing his picture from an internet site, as if there are millions of pedophiles just waiting to pound on the opportunity to analyze it and determine his location?
Whoever did this must have delusions of grandeur in thinking he can levee any kind of protection whatsoever on a younger member of the forums by preventing him from posting his picture.
Let Patryk1023 decide for himself whether he wants to do that, and if you're really that concerned, tell him to ask his parents for approval.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
I was uploading 741M and 1053M, but the Chrome tabs crashed overnight. Reuploading now through a different browser. They should be up soon.
Chrono Trigger is just over halfway encoded.
edit:
1053M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4y9SHcC43A
741M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXDyFTYadzg
450M
edit: chrono trigger will be a bit later. it'll probably be done in a few days. My upload is the problem, for some reason my internet decided to start being awful all of a sudden, I can download things quickly but establishing the connection takes forever.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
I've made a minor modification to the script to remove the logo code (since I'm using a video logo). Here's the script I'm using. My question: why does it end up with a video of size 1792x1344? The source is 256x224.
edit: since I only need 3584x2688 I modified the script again.
edit 2:
[01:45am] Aktan: dada_: can you do me a favor and mention in that thread that multiple pointresizes hurt?
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Nahoc wrote:
Dada wrote:
450M (Chrono Trigger in 4:21) first pass turned out to be 17.34GB (that's without any upscaling at 60fps, in the lossless TSCC codec). Now I just need to cull it to 30fps, upscale it to 3584x2688, add subtitles with run information, and add a logo.
3584x2688? You only need 1536x1344, for YouTube.
I was told that SNES videos should be upscaled to 3584x2688, ie (256*14)x(224*12), because otherwise there won't be an "original" quality setting. Could someone please confirm this?
Also, I changed my logo, it's slightly over 2 seconds (2.7 according to VirtualDub; mostly because of the fade), is that okay or should I trim it down just a little more?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izPG6Yh8Q6U
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
DarkKobold wrote:
janus wrote:
You give it meh because you don't want to watch it? That's a weird reason
so you would give a meh to Final Fantasy 7-8, which will probably be as long?
to others : don't be fooled by the duration. You can watch it under 2 hours by fast-forwarding dialogues and slowing it down during fights
Janus: Once somebody posts it on Youtube, I suggest you use the #t=0m00s to link people to the important fights. That is what I plan to do with Final Fantasy 8.
You don't even need to, you can just type time codes in the description (on Youtube itself) and they'll automatically turn into time links, like here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qoisyl8Om8Y
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
450M (Chrono Trigger in 4:21) first pass turned out to be 17.34GB (that's without any upscaling at 60fps, in the lossless TSCC codec). Now I just need to cull it to 30fps, upscale it to 3584x2688, add subtitles with run information, and add a logo.
edit: if I use this old logo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lev39SBngTM) and clean it up a little, like putting in the correct text and URL and maybe increasing the font size, would that be an acceptable logo?
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Bisqwit wrote:
the Pirate Party party had no candidates I could really honestly support; all of them had one or more things which I would object to. Most often that would be emphatic atheism.
I suppose this shouldn't be too hard to believe, coming from you, but it's still somewhat surprising that you'd actually refuse to vote for someone because of a personal belief that there is no God.
I don't know the Pirate Party of Finland, but generally atheist politicians are really not interested in expunging religion because the separation of Church and state is already a done deal. There is no such thing as a "war on religion", except to keep the state free from religious bias, as is the general and often constitutionally defined ideal. I've personally voted for Christians before even though I'm an atheist, because those particular candidates realized that religion and politics are separate domains. I'd like to hear your thoughts on that; why not vote for the atheist candidates if you otherwise approve of their policies?
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Warp wrote:
The major problem is the practically religious multiculturalism that basically all the other political parties and the entirety of the media professes, and where it has lead other European countries (such as Sweden, the UK, France, Belgium, Germany and others). As a Swedish, you can check the success of your multiculturalist experiment in your own country (although in many cases you'll have to check it from foreign media, as your own media is rather keen to censor itself, not unlike the Finnish media).
The idea that you "can't discuss immigration" or that multiculturalism is "practically a religion" is a stubborn lie that's kept alive only by those opposed to immigration who use it to gain sympathy.
Fact is, immigration is the top political issue in the entire European Union other than maybe the economic crisis. We're discussing it right now. There are tons of people on other websites discussing it now. There's no honeymoon for this issue on either side.
That said, there's a lot to be told about this issue. It seems to me that Western Europe is experiencing something similar to what the US has been for the last couple of decades with immigrants from Latin America. After the passage of liberalizing trade agreements like NAFTA, a lot of the US manufacturing industry was shipped over the border, and likewise a lot of small farming communities and small businesses south of the border were decimated, so there was a huge swell of immigrants who began coming there illegally in search of opportunities. A lot of them planted roots, had kids here (which, in the United States, guarantees citizenship to children) and began "taking" jobs for lower pay and living outside the system for the most part.
So what we're seeing here in Western Europe, albeit with a different origin, is similar in effect. Immigrants tend to perform worse than the native population in almost every category because they tend to be poor, uneducated, unassimilated and therefore lack the same kind of opportunities that the majority population does. Since those conditions are usually accompanied with crime, a lot of the kids drop out and get involved with criminal organizations or end up populating prisons.
Now basically what opponents of immigration will have you believe is that progressives (such as the Green Party you so derisively namedropped just now) don't care about any of this and are uninterested in even acknowledging this reality, let alone do anything to improve it. That's also a lie. What I've described is how it is all over in the West where there has been significant immigration. This is not in dispute by anyone, and it makes sense at that. It's also pretty clear what must be done: invest in people, because unless you can pull them from their own little unassimilated communities and teach them the language and get them into a position where they can get a job, you're basically condemning them to remain there for the rest of their lives. Right-wingers would rather have us not spend any more money on them (they consider the whole issue a lost cause, anyway) because they "should be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps". You can chalk that one up to right-wingers generally believing problems will solve themselves if only you hope for it badly enough.
Given that little abbreviated backstory, a lot of people are really pissed and the reaction for years has been the usual bigotry: calls to tighten security at the border, and the whole "go back to where you came from" bullshit. However it's been getting worse over the last couple years as anti-immigration has become a political movement and we're seeing a lot of ugly shit like openly racist and Islamophobic politicians. It's not nearly as bad as it is in the United States just yet, but given that the politicization of immigration in Europe is coinciding with one of the most serious economic crises in history, it's not unlikely that things will get worse.
Warp wrote:
(which scarcity is aggravated even more due to the economic crisis and the need to cut on budgets)
This is also an extremely misguided idea posited by those who want to use the crisis for reasons of increasing the gap between rich and poor. During an economic crisis, the main problem you have to worry about is wasted human and industrial resources. You can't crawl out of a crisis with half the country is sitting around twiddling its thumbs.
So you invest money into the economy in the form of stimulus in order to get the country working again—the bill can be paid off after the recovery. Austerity is basically the extreme opposite of that idea: instead of investing in the country so that it can get back on its feet, you take away numerous vital public services and essentially force the taxpayer to foot the bill for everyone. Austerity measures are usually implemented by right-wing political parties who at the same time grace the business world with tax cuts that have been proven to be ineffective in actually helping the economy.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
By the way, I'll gladly help out, since I have an uncapped Youtube account.
Most (all?) of these videos seem to have an Internet Archive mirror, so I'll download the highest quality from there and upload that verbatim to Youtube. Would that be acceptable?
I'm thinking 450 >= 1053. Minus 474 since Brandon has that on his queue.
edit: downloading 450M, 474M, 506M from Archive.org. Will get 705M, 723M, 741M tomorrow.
edit 2: since we're doing HD encodes now, I've settled on 450M, 741M, 1053M.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
If anybody wants to back things up from Google Video, you can also simply snatch the FLV link from any browser's developer toolbox.
Google Chrome has this built-in (I think it's Ctrl+Shift+I to open it on Windows, Command+Option+I on OSX). Just go to the Network tab and sort by size, and then download the URL.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Is there anything else that could be interesting to save from there that we didn't make? I've only just heard about Google Video closing down and there isn't much time, so other video owners might miss this completely.
Bag of Magic Food wrote:
Oh man, so all those videos are going to just disappear if their owners don't take care of them and upload them somewhere else? Yeah, I can only imagine how many good game play-throughs we're going to lose, for one thing. Just the other day I discovered that Slightly Magic has a walkthrough on Google Videos!
Are you going to reupload any of these? I think it's probably okay to do so even if the authors are absent. In part because I don't think you can even see who uploaded the videos.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
FODA wrote:
Dada wrote:
I have no idea.
Also, Angelfire? Seriously?
I'm open to suggestions heh... The two things I like about it:
1 - I already have the account.
2 - I can use the ftp on windows explorer.
What's stupid about it:
1 - 15 mb space
2 - banner
I must admit I haven't kept up with the best free file hosts since getting my own server years ago, but surely there must be something that doesn't litter your page with ads? Maybe Google Sites, although that has even less storage space. Or maybe Dropbox, I don't know if you can use it to display files publicly to even people without an account.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
On another note:
Link to video
SWL 2011 final match between Flash and Bisu, the #1 and #2 by Elo rating. For those Starcraft fans who haven't seen it yet. This was recorded last Saturday and it's a brilliant match. It starts at 6:54.
