Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 716
I have all most of my recent publications on my server, which are mostly mkv. So if archive.org supports just downloading them from there instead of requiring us to upload them by hand, it would save us a lot of time.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 716
The run itself was good, although I would have enjoyed the SMS version a lot more personally. I also found your stylistic choices during the autoscroll level and waiting periods rather meh as that constant spinning noise distracted from that beautiful 8bit music :(
In the end, it's still a weak yes vote.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 716
It does, but it's rather pointless as you'd either want to listen to the game's music/sfx or listen to the commentary with the game's volume turned down. As adelikat suggested, mixing those two channels with something like audacity would yield the best end results.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 716
That's too sad to hear. Maybe you guys can work out a collaboration for this run and start off with his old status (can he provide you with his latest m64 file?)?
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 716
Great improvement indeed. My only fear is that as there are so many of them that it may become even harder to complete the new 120 star run, let alone hex in the stars you already finished.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 716
Derakon, have you tried compiling your own mplayer? Given that you know a tad about encoding stuff I guess that you're technical enough to at least give it a shot. If it works out for you on 10.4, why not try and build a static binary for other Mac users to use? Similarly, are there really this few Mac users out there that only one has complained about it without trying themselves? Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming you, just curious.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 716
The "first" FAQ link to appear is already the one on the main site and it's even in bigger letters. That those don't help the regular ignorant user shouldn't need to be mentioned, though.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 716
Derakon wrote:
Can you translate that into layman, please? :)
I do my encodes with mencoder, the encoder program of mplayer. To improve the quality of a movie, there are two ways of doing so:
1) Drop duplicate frames. By this, mencoder takes at every frame and compares it to the one before. If they are exactly the same (i.e. not one pixel changed), the second one is dropped. Those frames aren't given to the x264 encoder. Because the latter still encodes at the set bitrate (say 200kbps) and parts of the frames are just left out, the video bitrate drops a bit (10% dupe frames -> 10% lower bitrate = 180kbps). This is done because dropping frames saves more space than the codec saving the info that there's no difference in two (or more) consecutive frames.
2) Use so-called bframes: without getting too technical, they also save bitrate (that can then be used on other that need a higher one) and give a good picture.
Combining these two wasn't possible to me because mencoder screwed up if you used them both at the same time. Using some AVISynth scripts I managed to get it running. As far as I can tell, it's still all standard compliant (thanks to mkv!), but Johannes may have some more input on that issue.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 716
Derakon wrote:
I assume that the new MKVs that are being generated here have a better quality-size ratio than the old versions that older versions of VLC are able to digest. Does anyone know exactly how good these savings are? Or is there some other benefit that I'm missing that outweighs the value of supporting people with outdated players?
The main difference would be that my recent encodes drop duplicate frames and use bframes at the same time; which wasn't possible for me prior to using new encoding measures.
You might find some recent builds of mplayer over here.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Former player
Joined: 12/5/2007
Posts: 716
I did like the idea of killing (nearly) every enemy passing by, but there still was a little too much pointlessly jumping against the ceiling for my taste. Voting meh.