I know this is not news by any stretch, but videos from this site are popping up more and more on other sites. People edit out the portion of the movie that contains your disclaimer and then upload it as if they recorded it themselves.
An in-the-corner watermark would help to solve this problem. Everytime i find one i make sure to spam the associated site with "THIS IS A TAS, IT CAME FROM TASVIDEOS.ORG", so in that sense it's getting you guy's some advertising :)
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Say we had the watermark, wouldn't it be annoying to have it in the corner of a video? It might cover something important.
And I don't see what stops someone putting their watermark over ours.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Come on, this was discussed many times already. The strongest argument against it is that you can't prevent the videos from "popping up" anyway since it is ridiculously easy to do a fresh encoding of the emulator output, while a watermark would just distract and/or annoy the regular audience.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
with that attitude, why do we have a disclaimer at all? Because it will help to stop SOME of it. A watermark will help stop some MORE of it.
The watermark does not have to be permanent, it could pop up for 5 seconds every minute, and that would suffice.
Granted there are no easy answers, but "what if's" are not a reason to do nothing.
Granted there are no easy answers, but "what if's" are not a reason to do nothing.
Instead of doing "nothing", it's better to do "something" which would be a bigger bother for both viewers and encoders, correct? It's impossible to care about everything, this is an excessive measure.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Joined: 8/1/2004
Posts: 2687
Location: Seattle, WA
This is retarded. If we put a watermark in there, it will only drive people to encode their own movies for dispersal. A watermark will do nothing but clutter up the videos.
What we do now (put disclaimers all over the video) is enough that we get the point across without intruding too much. In the long run, it is probably the most we can do without restricting submission views.
Go look around the net, see how many of your movies have been stolen, and are being credited to someone else.
This comunity has certainly changed since i started comming here. Guess that's why i dont post very often anymore.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
The only way for us to prevent them appearing all over without our credits is to take down the emulator files, but I don't find that feasible.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Nach, that wouldn't even work.
kileran, look how well the MPAA is doing against people distributing their videos. And they have billions of dollars to invent hidden watermarks, which aren't working.
But we have better weapons to fight piracy. The MPAA has lawyers. We have ninjas.
So let our four ninjas pay those pirates a nightly visit, problem solved!
(this post should have either a green dog or a giant image, but I'm too poor to afford them.)
more on topic, I hate additional disclaimers during the run. For me, they disrupt the viewing experience as much as commercials during a good movie. The short intro is doing enough to educate those who want to be educated, but little can be done about those who deliberately ignore the rules - so please, let's not ruin the movies in a vain attempt to stop rip-offs.
Joined: 8/1/2004
Posts: 2687
Location: Seattle, WA
kileran wrote:
Go look around the net, see how many of your movies have been stolen, and are being credited to someone else.
This comunity has certainly changed since i started comming here. Guess that's why i dont post very often anymore.
Not many.
You've only been here a few months so shut the fuck up and get back in the gas chamber.
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
BoltR wrote:
kileran, look how well the MPAA is doing against people distributing their videos. And they have billions of dollars to invent hidden watermarks, which aren't working.
Well there is a difference between copying something for your own enjoyment vs. copying something to take credit for it.
I would not mind a watermark popping up for 5 seconds every 5 minutes. It wouldn't be a big deal to me, however I will leave that decision to those who actually do all the work around here. :D
I don't really know what a watermark is. 5 seconds every 5 minutes doesn't sound bad though. I think this
"with that attitude, why do we have a disclaimer at all? Because it will help to stop SOME of it. A watermark will help stop some MORE of it."
is a pretty strong argument.
Now, if we don't mind our videos being stolen and edited (I don't really know if we do, that much), then fine. If we do though, something like the above suggestion seems like a good place to start.
Joined: 8/1/2004
Posts: 2687
Location: Seattle, WA
A watermark is an image that is superimposed over the video file as a whole. It would be present the whole entire time, so it would be a pretty big distraction. If it's only there for a few seconds at a time, it will do nothing more than the spontaneous disclaimers we put in now. On top of that, including a watermark would only drive people to simply encode their own movies from the ROM/input files, which will effectively bypass any intro/disclaimer currently published movies will have.
All in all, the watermark is a useless idea. It will do nothing more than intrude on published avis whilst driving thieves to simply bypass all current disclaimers.
I also don't see our videos being 'stolen' as much as people seem to think. What I do see being passed off as others' work can be easily debunked.
with that attitude, why do we have a disclaimer at all?
So that at least our consciense is clear: We do our best to inform the audience that whatever is released on this site, is a tool-assisted movie as opposed to a trained skillful playing performance.
As for the prominence of those disclaimers, my goal is to seek an optimum balance between
1. Informing people that these are in fact, movies of tool-assisted playing (and also, who played it and where more information about "tool-assisted" can be found, or more productions of that particular author)
2. Discouraging people from removing that information
3. Annoying the audience as little as possible (avoiding the overlapping of interesting content, avoiding stealing the attention from the actual game movie)
The #1 of that list is historically important to avoid upsetting regular speedrunners, and to avoid deceiving the audience.
It is my belief that a permanent watermark would conflict strongly with both #2 and #3 of that list.
Zurreco wrote:
You've only been here a few months so shut the fuck up and get back in the gas chamber.
Please remove that aggressive attitude of yours. Usually, you have the facts right but your attitude is counterproductive.
Watermark or nothing, my runs are way too awesome to be mistaken for someone else's work. They're not needed on any tas of my genius.
As flame protection, this extends to the runs of anyone else who posts below this.
Everytime i find one i make sure to spam the associated site with "THIS IS A TAS, IT CAME FROM TASVIDEOS.ORG"
Then why can't you do that every 5 minutes instead of making a watermark appear on my avi downloads? I think you're on to something.
Wouldn't in be possible to put a little black line at the bottom of the movie file with the information, like a couple of pixel ? or to keep proportion, having a line at bottom and at right ?
I know it's not a perfect fullscreen, but it could be something like that, with the author's name and the link to the site. Maybe some TASer would like to add some information about some part of the movie, like subtitle in DVD ?
I suppose the best "relevant" watermarking would be to encode the video with the button presses included (is that possible)?
It's relevant to the run, but can also be obtrusive to the viewer.
Haven't really thought it through but that's kinda a neat idea DK. I always have input display on when watching movies in emulators.
I'm guessing it's not going to be a popular suggestion, but still I think it's a cool thought, if nothing else.
Would an almost invisible watermark with TAS on the bottom of the screen, only a couple of pixel would cause that much problem for the viewer ?
I think that what would be the best, if that people that want a watermark, try to encode a sample video with a couple of different watermark to see if it's that obtrusive.
It would be better to actually see an example before judging
Haven't really thought it through but that's kinda a neat idea DK. I always have input display on when watching movies in emulators.
Likewise.
Hmm for some odd reason, I thought it should be relatively trivial to include button presses during the avi dump of a run. Intuition would say to just display the input and capture the run. However the following exception leads me to believe that it's not quite that simple...
For N64 runs, the button presses are not embedded in the viewing window, so integration might not be as easy as first thought.
