Damn, I found the culprit: Adblock. When I disabled it, the videos started working fine.
I should have tested that to begin with. I apologize for the trouble.
I was pointing out that your comment of having NoScript installed would not be the problem as you wouldn't see the problem in the first place, instead of the problem you're currently having.
I jumped to conclusions, sorry.
Do you have any extension installed which may be modifying the JavaScript you download or as it's running? Or mess with flash?
It would have to be messing up with javascript or flash in a quite specific way, as it only happens when embedding the flash video happens like tasvideos.org is currently doing it. As said, I have no problems with videos which are embedded in other webpages in the regular way (for example, all the videos at failblog.org work just fine for me).
Besides NoScript I don't really know what could be interfering. I have some extensions like Adblock (rather unlikely) and PrefBar (also rather unlikely, but it does have an option to disable flash, so it might be interfering in certain very special situations, I suppose). Maybe I should just go through all the extensions I have installed and disable them one by one to see if the embedded videos start working. That would certainly catch the culprit.
I'm not familiar with RefControl, could it perhaps interfere with flash being embedded from a different origin?
It's used to limit sending referrer information on a per-site basis. It could be the cause only if those video streaming sites require referrer information, but it's unlikely because, as said, videos embedded in the regular way work just fine.
nevermind that I bought the disc and can do whatever I want with it.
That's actually not true. You don't buy the program. You buy a license to use the program. The disc comes implicitly with the license. Just because you bought a license to use the program doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with the program.
It's like renting a car: Just because you are entitled to use the car doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with it.
Should I also prohibit myself from playing while my friend does?
If you transfer the license to use the program to someone else, your right to use the program ends there.
That would be hilarious… but that's what your statement implies.
And exactly why would that be hilarious? Are you seriously telling me that buying one copy of the program should entitle you to distribute copies of it to whoever you want, and that anything else is "hilarious"? Why?
I still own the right to play the game because I paid money for it
Depends on the specific law of your country, but here if you transfer the license to someone else, you can not use the program legally anymore.
otherwise I could safely claim that every piece of your property I can lay my hand upon is mine because I now "physically own" it. But I would still be a criminal in either case!
I don't even understand what you are talking about.
Back when analog media was popular, it was common sense to make copies of CC and VHS tapes. We can't legally do that now with digital media.
Again, depends on the country. Here being able to make backups is a basic right. (But being able to make backups doesn't mean you have the right to give those backups to someone else, or keep using the backups after your rights to use the program ends, eg. because of giving it to someone else.)
Why? Because now that right-holders (the labels, not the artists) can interfere they are going to interfere — just because they can get more money off of it. Did it help the artists any? Yeah, right.
Exactly how does it help the artist that you copy the work to someone else?
What about pay per view services? Most ridiculous shit ever.
You are saying that, for example, movie theaters or video rentals are the most ridiculous shit ever?
Johannes wrote:
When I buy a product, I demand the freedom to do what I want with it. If copying a legally obtained game for my neighbor to enjoy is against the law, I have no sympathy for this industry.
That.
Sorry, I still don't get it. Under what logic does the concept of "I bought it, I should be entitled to copy it freely to anyone I want" fall under?
Does that mean that it should be ok if the company sells exactly one copy of their product, and then that one single purchased product is copied for everybody else to use for free? And exactly how does that make any sense?
Exactly why should you be able to copy a commercial product for your neighbor without the proper payment? How does the fact that you obtained the game legally affect this in any way? I don't understand. Is your logic that if you buy something legally you should be able to distribute it for free for others? I don't follow.
Yeah, see, when you're a kid and you're given some candy or whatever, you're told that sharing is good and you should give some to your friends, while hogging it up all for yourself is seen as social offense.
When you grow up you're told sharing is bad, and in fact is a criminal offense.
Follow this one.
The analogy is flawed. You don't "share" candy. You give candy. You physically stop owning a piece of candy by giving it to somebody else, so you can't use it anymore yourself. That's not sharing.
An equivalent would be if you buy a game disc and then give it to someone else, so that you can't play it yourself anymore. That's quite different from copying the game.
Note, if you have NoScript activated on the site, you won't see the buttons at all.
I think I made it relatively clear that I know what I'm doing. "When I try to watch an embedded video, it expands the area where the video would appear, and then the area just shrinks, as if the embedded player failed to load or something along those lines."
I'd say it's unlikely to get that effect if I had scripts disabled for tasvideos.org (or the video sites themselves.)
Did you test this with Viddler, DailyMotion, Google Video, and YouTube buttons? Or Is this only a problem with some of them?
I tested it with the Viddler, DailyMotion and YouTube, and all behave in the same way. It doesn't seem to depend on the video streaming site itself.
(This is not the only webpage where I have had hard time getting something similar to this to work, but it's relatively rare. It would be good to know what's causing it, though. Maybe it's fixable.)
This is probably caused by my particular Linux/Firefox setup (with its myriads of extensions), but nevertheless I'm hoping someone would have some suggestions about how to get the embedded videos working. (It's not like I really need them; I just would want my browser to work for the case when I might to need it, here or somewhere else.)
When I try to watch an embedded video, it expands the area where the video would appear, and then the area just shrinks, as if the embedded player failed to load or something along those lines. Note that:
1) I don't have any problems watching videos on any of the video sites directly (youtube, dailymotion, viddler...)
2) I don't have problems watching videos which have been embedded (in the regular way) in other websites.
3) The embedded videos work in Konqueror but not in Firefox, so it has to be something specific to my Firefox in particular.
4) I do use the NoScript, RefControl and Cookie Button add-ons for Firefox, but those haven't prevented watching videos as mentioned above.
One thing to ponder about the concept demos section: Which rules would govern a new submission obsoleting an old one? Given that at least some of the runs will have purely aesthetic entertainment goals, how do we decide whether a new submission should replace it, be published alongside it, or rejected because "there's already a perfectly good run with these goals"?
If copying a legally obtained game for my neighbor to enjoy is against the law, I have no sympathy for this industry.
I fail to follow your logic here.
Exactly why should you be able to copy a commercial product for your neighbor without the proper payment? How does the fact that you obtained the game legally affect this in any way? I don't understand. Is your logic that if you buy something legally you should be able to distribute it for free for others? I don't follow.
Also I don't understand why you "have no sympathy for this industry" if it's illegal to distribute commercial products to others. I fail to follow your logic here as well.
That's not really a valid argument. If I added support for changing ROM and RAM addresses to a movie file format, would that make it automatically acceptable? Of course not. The movie file format supporting something doesn't tell anything about its validity.
As a case in point: Many movie recording file formats support storing savestates (afaik). That doesn't make starting a game from a savestate any more acceptable.
TASes should be about supplying input to the game (regardless of how it's done). Allowing the movie file to affect the console itself (eg. resetting it) is stepping a bit out of this boundary. That's not playing the game itself anymore.
so as long as it is an input on an accepted emulator then the possible code execution paths the movies can have include this button.
Resetting the console does not cause a new code execution path to be performed. Not in the game itself. It causes the (emulated) console to reset and start from scratch.
The programmers did a program for a specific hardware, and this abuses the hardware PLUS the programmers' logic. On the pokemon case, they didn't protect their game from turning off their target hardware while saving, newer pokemon games do have that protection.
You could use that same argument to allow gamegenie codes.
I've heard people who actually love videogames say "hell no, I will NEVER spend money on games, because they are available for free!" with a lot of pride on saying that, because it would be really stupid to pay for something that is free. That is how piracy is encrusted in our culture.
What these people do not realize (or refuse to think about, or outright just don't care) is that they are pirating the software at the expense of honest, paying customers. In other words, the "fools" who pay for the software are also paying for those pirated copies. It's the paying customers who are keeping the software company alive, and the software company has to price their products according to how well they sell. More piracy means that they sell less, meaning that prices go higher, which means that the paying customers are paying for the pirated copies.
Then there's the moral issue (which most people don't seem to give a rat's ass about): By using a pirated software you are using someone else's hard work without giving him the money he deserves. You are directly benefiting from someone else without giving anything back. That's really selfish. But of course people don't care.
And I just can't stand all the tired excuses that most people make. It would even be better if all people were just direct and honest, and directly admitted that "yes, I'm abusing someone's hard work, I'm using it for my own benefit and not giving anything back, I'm being selfish, and I don't give a damn" rather than come up with all the old, tired excuses. At least it would be honest.
but aren't detaching controllers, switching disk sides, opening CD-ROM drives, inserting coins and so on (ab)using the hardware as well?
I'd say that if abusing the hardware modifies the behavior of the game in a glitchy way, it goes to the gray area of whether it's "pure" and "legit" TASing or whether it's "cheating" (in the TAS sense). After all, we already forbid abusing emulator bugs, modifying the game's code by using the emulator RAM poking or by emulating a gamegenie or similar device, as well as using any kind of modified ROMs.
I think this is an excellent idea. A lot of the runs that get rejected for reasons other than being poorly done should be made available to viewers, or future TASers, as they sometimes contain useful insights or strategies that aren't in the published runs.
If/when the concept demos section of the site is implemented, maybe there should be another poll about which currently rejected submissions should be resurrected into the concept demos section, similar to that recent similar poll.
All that being said, the Pokémon Yellow SRAM corruption glitch run is extremely entertaining and totally possible on a real Game Boy with the right ridiculous luck (and I'm all about luck manipulation!), which makes me really want to keep SRAM corruption around as legitimate here.
I fully agree with that, but I feel that if anything should go to the (yet to be fully realized) concept demos section of the site (as was the thing which originally inspired me to bump this thread), it should be those SRAM corruption runs, IMO. (If they are considered "legit" TASes to be published alongside everything else, then at least keep them as a separate and independent category.)
Using external hardware or modifying the system is very different from merely making the game change the values in the SRAM already present in the system, which it does while playing normally anyway (via saving).
That may be so, but I just can't help feeling that it's a technique not related to the game, but abusing the hardware. After all, it's not the game which handles the reset button (AFAIK).
Or if I put that in another way: The "reset" button is not an input to the game. It's an input to the console itself (emulated in this case, but doesn't make much of a difference in principle). Thus it's a trick related to the hardware and not to the game. That's why I compared it to a game genie: You are affecting the game by abusing the hardware. That's not gameplay.
Lex wrote:
The fact that SRAM corruption is done only by pressing buttons on the console
It just bothers me that the reset button is the only button which does not supply input to the game, and thus bypasses the software and goes directly to the hardware. Again, a bit like a gamegenie device, in a way. I just can't shake this feeling that it's a bit like "cheating" (in the bad sense from TASing point of view).
anti-piracy techniques tend to be more harmful for the legitimate players than effective at stopping piracy.
Actually some anti-piracy measures in single-player games have been surprisingly effective. IIRC, one of the Splinter Cell games had an anti-piracy measure which took over one year for hackers to crack. That's quite impressive, given that the average game gets cracked and distributed even before it hits the shelves.
One thing which bothers me is the attitude many people have towards software piracy (moreso because I earn my living as a game programmer myself, so game piracy really hits home in my case). For example the "Pirate Party" in Finland has the opinion that it should be the constitutional and basic human right for people to be able to copy and distribute all the music, movies and software they want free of charge, and that eg. software companies should not have the legal right to demand money for the use of their products (in other words, programmers should not have the right to make their living out of their programming jobs). That's not an exaggeration. I have talked with them, and they have expressed that opinion more or less literally.
Guess if that kind of attitude grinds my gears.
I apologize for bumping this thread again, but a thread in the submissions forum raised this question again, and this issue honestly bothers me a bit. I would like to hear your opinions.
What bothers me about SRAM corruption is that it's not bug/glitch abuse. In fact, it's not really related to the game itself at all. It's related to the console hardware. In other words, resetting during a save emulates what happens to the console hardware in such a situation, rather than what happens to the game. The subsequent game data corruption is only a side-effect of abusing the hardware.
Somehow that feels so detached from the game itself that it just doesn't feel right. You could as well try to emulate what happens to the game if you smash the console with a sledgehammer (or if you want a more realistic example, you could try to emulate what happens if a RAM chip in the console suddenly breaks). What happens might be interesting, but is it really TASing? Or is it just emulating hardware abuse?
Or if I go more to the point: You could as well "emulate" what happens if you had a gamegenie connected to the console and entered some codes.
I don't really see a lot of difference here. Both techniques would be emulating hardware abuse, and how that abuse affects the game. If the game starts behaving in strange ways it's not because of any bug or oversight in the game itself. It's because you abused the console hardware (emulated, but still).
For this reason I strongly oppose the idea that SRAM corruption runs would obsolete any of the more "legit" runs of the same game. In fact, it wouldn't bother me at all if the technique was banned altogether (but I suppose it's too popular for that). At the very least, it should be kept as its own separate category which doesn't obsolete nor override more normal categories.
We've been doing this for quite a while, except with "major glitching" instead of "SRAM corruption" (which counts as a major glitch).
SRAM corruption isn't really a major glitch.
You can't blame the programmers for not making the game fault tolerant enough to withstand power outages. In fact in this case, you're forcing the power outage.
You have a good point, and I think that's precisely what sets SRAM corruption apart from other forms of glitching, and why IMO it should be considered a category on its own right. SRAM corruption doesn't abuse any feature of the game itself per se, but a feature of the console hardware (ie. how it behaves if you press the reset button at a precise moment).
In fact, SRAM corruption is, in a way, so detached from the game itself, that personally I find it a bit dubious as a technique. You might as well emulate what happens to a game if you smash the console with a sledgehammer. Maybe if the emulator could emulate it well enough, something interesting might happen. But that would really be going beyond what TASing should be about.
That's the reason why I have the strong opinion that SRAM corruption runs should not obsolete other more "legit" (for the lack of a better word) types of run. (In fact, personally I wouldn't mind if SRAM corruption would be banned altogether.)
We broke this rule by having published an any% run which doesn't use SRAM corruption glitch. It's not the fastest, it's just showing off the fastest route in the game without SRAM corruption. I think we should move that run to our concept demos section.
I have to vote against that suggestion.
In my opinion SRAM corruption is "too much" of a glitch, destroys the whole game and makes the end result extremely chaotic in most games where it's exploited. Granted, Super Metroid may be the game which suffers the least (in terms of chaotic results) by SRAM corruption, but it nevertheless results in, I dare to say, a slightly less interesting run. Other games suffer a lot more from abusing this bug, which makes them ending up being completely random and chaotic (I'm looking at you, pokemon).
Of course SRAM corruption should be allowed as a technique where applicable (because exploiting bugs is one of the core ideas of TASing), but in my opinion a non-SRAM-corrupting run of each game should be allowed, when it makes sense and results in an enjoyable run.
I vote for officially allowing three different categories on each game, where suitable:
1) Anything goes (including SRAM corruption).
2) Fastest without abusing SRAM corruption.
3) Fastest 100% completion.
But of course, as said, only when it makes sense. Super Metroid is, IMO, such a case.
Why? Because #2 is often more enjoyable than #1 (which is often more a curiosity than an entertaining movie), without being so overly long as #3.
I think that this is a good moment to bring up once again a relatively old idea which never caught on at the time (well, in none of the more than one times when it has been suggested):
How about creating a more separate "concept demos" section of the website where alternative versions of runs, funny videos, playarounds and other such tool-assisted runs not completely suitable for main tasvideos publications could be put? Runs like this one could well go to that separate section. This way the hard work put into this run would not go completely to waste.
Just bringing up an old idea...
I suppose I got confused by mencoder seemingly not having any direct option for outputting to an mkv. It wasn't quite evident that "if you selected libavformat to do the muxing of the output file (by using the -of lavf), the appropriate container format will be determined by the file extension of the output file."
If you do that, then you need to format it so that it is more readable.
For example:
bool Point::operator<(const Point& rhs)
{
return x != rhs.x ?
x < rhs.x : y != rhs.y ?
y < rhs.y : z < rhs.z;
}
I much prefer
bool Point::operator<(const Point& rhs)
{
return x != rhs.x ? x < rhs.x :
y != rhs.y ? y < rhs.y :
z < rhs.z;
}
And since we are in the topic of "guess what this program does", the next question would be: Which encoding does the following function perform (function name obfuscated so that it won't give the answer right away):
void foo(const unsigned char* begin, const unsigned char* end, std::string& dest)
{
while(begin < end)
{
unsigned value = 0;
char buf[6] = { 'z', 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 };
for(int i = 0; i < 4; ++i, ++begin)
value = value << 8 | (begin<end ? *begin : 0);
if(value || begin > end)
for(int i = 0; i < 5; ++i, value/=85) buf[4-i] = value%85+33;
dest += buf;
}
if(begin > end) dest.resize(dest.size()-(begin-end));
}
