You are obviously encoding them wrongly because it contradicts my experience.
Besides, you should use a more realistic upscaling to 640x480 rather than going overboard just for the sake of trying to prove me wrong.
I would add, although it might go without saying, but just in case: If you need to change the video resolution from the original game to the encoded video, use the best possible image scaling filter available (both if scaling from a larger resolution to a smaller one and the other way around).
Just because you are scaling eg. a 640x480 FMV to 320x240 doesn't mean it has to look bad. With proper scaling filters it can look acceptable, without relevant loss of visual information.
Btw, why couldn't the maximum resolution used in the game be used for the video encode, scaling all the smaller resolution parts to that larger size?
No, it will not make the video file larger. The size of the video file is determined by the bitrate used, not by the resolution of the video. And no, using a larger resolution with the same bitrate does not decrease the quality of the video. (In fact, my experience tells it's the opposite: Using a larger source image resolution can actually increase the final video quality with the same bitrate, compared to making a video of half the resolution.)
Question: If two movies look similar, and for that reason the newer submission gets rejected, why is it that the older one gets favored over the newer one? Isn't this a bias towards who gets to submit first? Why should that affect judgment in any way?
If you really want that javascript animation to be there, couldn't it be made lighter? Does javascript support some sleep() function or something, to make the animation advance less often?
Btw, to those who don't want to turn off javascripts completely, if you are using firefox I recommend installing the NoScript addon. It allows enabling and disabling javascripts on a per-site basis (and can really improve the security of the browser).
Maybe the searching system could have some error tolerance, similar to google? I don't mean it has to use the same algorithm as the family feud game, but for example whitespaces could be optional. (The results could be ordered at some priority on how much the result differs from the search string, eg. how many whitespaces had to be removed or added.)
I was wondering: Could it be that some people who vote on submissions don't actually fully realize that the submission voting and movie rating have been unified? Maybe they have the notion that when they rate on the submission forum, they are voting for the submission to be published or rejected. I see how this would induce some people to vote 10/10 when they want a movie to be published.
Likewise, when someone goes to the actual rating page of a movie and rates it, he most probably fully realizes that he is now expressing an opinion of the quality of an already-published movie, and that his rating doesn't really affect anything, which can make him rate more rationally and conservatively. In this sense the yes/no submission vote was more practical (and didn't bias the ratings).
It really makes sense that while being able to rate at the submission forum sounds handy and practical, it induces this kind of bias. It just tempts people to vote 10/10 to get the movie published. Maybe it would indeed be better that only published movies were rated.
This gave me an idea for another suggestion: How about separating the submission ratings and the published movie ratings? Basically the submission ratings can be used by the voters to express their opinion and the judges to overview the general opinion, but then these ratings would be reset when the movie is published. Sure, it may seem an annoyance to have to rate movies twice, but if the current system doesn't work, it could be an improvement.
So in practice rather than having a yes/no/meh vote, you have a 0.0-10.0 vote, which is only for expressing your opinion on whether the submission should be accepted. If you want to actually rate the movie, wait for it to be published and rate it.
Btw, I think the idea of biasing a user's ratings by the average of them has merit. Every person has his own concept of what "average" means (to some it's 5.0, to others it's 7.5, yet to others it's something different even if they don't realize it themselves). OTOH it could be difficult to make this system fair.
In some cases, using the optimal strategy for speed is a lot more boring to watch. A prime example (at least as far as I'm concerned) is Final Fantasy 6j/FF3a. As soon as Setzer joins the group, it's mostly all about using Joker Doom to kill every boss. And that's where the entertainment went downhill.
On the other hand, this issue could be a double-edged sword, very particularly with RPGs.
When playing normally OHKO attacks against big bosses happen extremely rarely, which keeps the game balanced, but if they are calculated by random events, they can be abused in a TAS so that they will happen every time, which may lead to the "boring" run as you say.
On the other hand, if the other alternative is to beat the bosses "honestly", without using such cheap luck manipulation trikcs, the only possibility might be to do it like you would when playing normally, that is, by heavily leveling up before the boss. However, watching someone level up can be even more boring than watching the OHKO hits.
There could be a third possibility as well: Abusing luck to not get enough damage to die in boss battles, and grind the boss slowly to death. However, this can take a long time (for example the very first Dragon Warrior 1 TAS did this with the final boss, and it took something like 20 minutes or the like, IIRC, to beat it; needless to say it was utterly boring).
So which one of these three would you prefer? I don't know about you, but if I had to choose, I'd prefer watching the OHKOs.
I'm an idiot. Scratch what I said.
I didn't notice that the video hadn't completely downloaded when I tried to play it. Clearly mplayer got confused by the partial data. Oops!
Oops! Scratch all I said. I'm such an idiot.
The video has not, in fact, finished downloading. I didn't notice that, and instead tried to play it when it was incomplete. It seems mplayer got confused about the format because all the data is not there.
Now I'm embarrassed.
I have to retract a bit what I have said. I can't play the newest snes lemmings video even with the all-powerful mplayer because the video apparently requires some DirectShow filter which mplayer does not support (not even with the official codec pack from mplayer's website).
I have to agree that this trend of using less and less generic formats and codecs is getting out of hand. When you can't play a video in Linux, I think it's time to set some ground rules to the encoding process.
Ok, so far I have been able to play all the videos published using mplayer, but this is the first one which I can't. Apparently it requires some DirectShow filter which mplayer does not support, not even with the official codec pack available at mplayer's home site.
So far I have not complained about the videos using less and less common formats and codecs, because everything has worked for me, but now a limit has been reached. When even mplayer can't play the video, I think it's time to revise the encoding rules a bit. It's getting ridiculous.
That has happened at least once already (Gunstar Heroes for Genesis), so yes. With most games it probably wouldn't be so easily accepted though.
Wasn't this also 2P v. 1P, though?
The old run was 1p then new one was 2p and 3.5min longer.
It was also a harder difficulty tho.
Then it was not really that a newer version with more speed/entertainment tradeoffs (but otherwise the same goals) obsoleted the older publication, but a movie with different goals was accepted and made to obsolete the older one (kind of "unpublishing" the old movie).
Note that "speedrun" is not mutually exclusive with alternative goals (as long as these goals make sense). This is so in the regular speedrunning community (which have things like 100% speedruns, easy-difficulty and hard-difficulty speedruns, etc) as well as the tool-assisted one. Also speed/entertainment tradeoffs are often accepted if the gain in entertainment is significant enough. OTOH it's always best to first consult the forums if a certain speed tradeoff is acceptable or not (as you just did).
And yes: Entertainment by speed has been the goal from the beginning, and sloppy playing (ie. wasting time for no good reason) frowned upon.
Maybe this would be a good heuristic of what makes a good TAS: Since it's tool-assisted, it must show superhuman feats, something no human could possibly ever do. (Ok, there are games where humans are awesomely good at, eg. SMB1, but those are rather the exception.)
It's revolting to me that there are actually people against this.
There's a difference between being against something and thinking that people have the wrong priorities. Saying "this is not such an urgent matter as some people make it sound" is not saying that you are opposed to the idea.
Another problem with MKVs is that they can't be uploaded on archive.org, and since some people don't like Rapidshare, those movies are doomed to have no mirrors.
What is the problem in making a direct audio/video stream copy from the MKV to an AVI? Because it's a direct stream copy, the end result (ie. video and audio) will be identical to the original, but now it's just inside an AVI instead of an MKV. Unless I'm mistaken, you can do this rather easily with VirtualDubMod, mencoder and other similar software.
Stop complaining and do that.
Ah, nothing like the good old argumentum ad hominem when you are out of better arguments. A bit sad that you have to resort to such childishness, though.
Get your own house in order before going after someone else. Americans are responsible for Gitmo; they aren't responsible for Turkey or Lebanon.
I think that the point was that people who loudly complain about Guantanamo have the wrong priorities. They prioritize by "visibility" rather than by the gravity of the situation: The problems with Guantanamo Bay are more "visible" and get more media attention, and thus are an easier target to protest against. However, Guantanamo Bay doesn't get even close to being the worst prison on Earth, and there are tons of places which would require worldwide attention and protest much more urgently.
In other words, people protest against Guantanamo Bay because it's more fashionable, rather than being the most urgent problem in the world.
I didn't *really* expect it to be published, but I didn't submit it as a gruefood either. So it wasn't really a big surprise when it was not accepted. (Although, as I have been saying lately, I still think that publication should not really be so much about how "boring" the game itself is... But whatever.)
The obligatory damage seems to be some kind of bug, glitch or perhaps a deliberate programmed feature which happens at random.
I'm pretty sure of that because I actually started making a second run soon after my submission was rejected, this time trying to abuse the warp-from-left-screen-edge-to-the-right-edge glitch to save some seconds. At one point (in a level where it's not possible to abuse that glitch) I got into a situation where it was, once again, completely impossible to avoid damage. It seemed like you had to take the damage regardless of where you were on screen. You could be at the other extreme of the screen from the enemy which causes the damage and you would still get it. And this point was a few levels before the last one (in which I got the damage in my submitted run).
No amount of backtracking seemed to get rid of that damage point, so even though it seemingly is possible to manipulate those mandatory damage points to not to happen, it's not easy. (It obviously must be possible because I didn't get any damage at that point in my submitted run.)
It seems that the people who made this game not only wanted to piss off players, any TAS runners as well (even though they didn't even know of such a thing back then).
An AVI file with H264 video + mp3 audio maybe isn't the optimal choice but it's reasonably small and everyone can open it.
That's certainly not true. And the steps required for your computer to be able to play h264 videos often automatically mean you will be able to play mkvs as well (at least if you make the easiest steps, rather than trying to kludge WMP to try to play them).
I'm sorry if this isn't the right place to put this, but whenever I try to watch the new SMRPG run, Media Player Classic always freezes up.
Have you tried with VLC player?
Why can't all the videos on the side be avi?
I suppose there are two main reasons:
1) The indexing data at the end of AVI files increases the file size by a surprisingly large amount. I don't have concrete numbers, but we are talking about things like a 20 MB video increased by 1 MB or something like that. (Does someone have any more concrete numbers, so that I don't spread too much BS?)
2) The AVI format, for some reason, is such that audio in ogg format cannot be embedded into it. The ogg format has a better quality/size ratio than mp3 (besides being patent-free).
MKV would also support multiple soundtracks, multiple video tracks and multiple subtitle tracks, although these features are seldom used in TAS videos.
However, when you couple this opinion with several of the opinions from this thread (i.e. we shouldn't be too harsh on quality for fear of scaring people away), we basically turn this site into one which accepts anything. Not entertaining? Sure, accept it, because someone, somewhere may find it fun to watch. Not well done? Sure, accept it, because the person who made it may be scared away if we don't.
Well, I disagree with publishing videos of subpar quality.
If newcomers are scared because of high standards, then IMO that's their problem, not the problem of the tasvideos site.
CAD's argument is a simple one of economics: you were willing to pay the price requested for the good offered. If you hadn't been, you wouldn't have made the purchase. The information required to make an informed purchase was available; if you didn't avail yourself of it, well, that's your problem.
You don't really have a leg to stand on if you're going to complain about your purchase when it delivered on everything it said it would deliver. You can describe how it could have been better, but what does that accomplish, really?
OTOH one could argue that when you purchase a common product, there are certain things which you can *expect* the product to have, without having to check every single time from third-party sources that it indeed has all the relevant parts.
If I, for example, buy a movie DVD, I can certainly expect that it has, for instance, the *entire* movie. I don't *have* to check third-party sources to see if the entire movie is in there. I can perfectly assume.
If then I begin watching the movie and notice that 5 minutes of the ending are missing, I have the right to complain. Even if the DVD case had some small print which warned about this, and even if the internet was full of reviews warning about this, I would still have a perfectly good reason to complain. The product did not deliver everything that can commonly be expected for such a product.
