I want to contribute! What can I do?
This site depends on the contributions of its audience. Without you, there would be no TASVideos! Everybody has something they can contribute!
This list is broken down into types of contributing depending on the experience and resources of the user.
Just watching and giving your opinions can greatly help the site.
- If you have logged in, you can rate movies. This helps improve the quality of the current ratings. The more opinions the better.
- Registered users at the forums can become a test audience and vote on submissions, based on whether they liked it or not.
- It helps the judges in deciding whether the submission should be published to become part of the site's material, or rejected because it does not have enough entertainment and/or perfection in it.
- Note: Voting does not become available immediately. One needs to spend some effort in getting known by fellow posters before the voting becomes available.
(Advice on rating/voting is available at Voting Guidelines.)
Watch our movies on our Streaming media accounts
- Every publication has a link to the movie on Viddler and/or Dailymotion. Watching movies here increases our views which indirectly helps contribute the site.
All our publications come with a high quality video file (AVI, MKV, or MP4) available to users via BitTorrent.
Seed is a client who has a full copy of the file. When BitTorrent says "Download complete", you are a seed. Seeds are very helpful and in fact urgently needed,
because without them, AVI/MKV/MP4 downloading doesn't work. Even a small 5 kb/s is welcome.
To become a seed, just start downloading a movie and when
it asks where to save it, select your existing fully
downloaded movie. This makes you a seed, which only uploads.
Without uploaders, nobody can download!
It is possible to seed multiple files simultaneously.
Bisqwit has written a script called
btfriend.py
which automatically juggles the torrent files so that
the files which most urgently need seeding are being shared.
If you're a Windows user,
see the how to run Btfriend in Windows page.
Urgent seed requests
Here's an automatically generated list of files that most urgently need seeding right now (updated every 5 minutes):
Unknown module TorrentDisplay
How to read the priority: Priorities over 10000 are when the file has no seeds at all. This is most important. Without seeds, it's likely that people can not complete their download at all.
Priorities over 0.5 are when the file has a suboptimal number of seeds when compared to the number of downloaders. The higher the priority, the bigger the number of downloaders compared to the number of seeds.
Mirroring files on the Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a free digital library
which aims to preserve Internet sites and other cultural artifacts.
As of late 2003, Nolan Pflug, the curator of the
Speed Demos Archive, had his request
for a special speedrun category on the video section of the Archive granted.
As such, any speedrun videos (and many other type of game movies, including
machinima) may be uploaded freely to the Archive which provides unlimited
hosting for the files.
If you want to help out the site, you may want to provide HTTP or FTP mirrors
via the Internet Archive. The easiest way to do this is via FTP upload:
- Go to the Internet Archive's create item page. Make sure that you have an account and are logged in.
- Create a new item. Make sure that the identifier adheres to this format: (gametitle)-tas(version)-(author). E.g. rockman-tasv6-bisqwit. Keep in mind that if you're uploading the first version of a speedrun, there's no need to include a version number. E.g. superdemoworld_tlc-tas-jxq. Also, if there are special identifiers present for a movie, you must include them. E.g. supermario64-tas-16stars-spezzafer.
- Once the Archive has verified that the identifier is unused, it will set up an FTP directory for you. Using the login information shown on the creation page, you're able to upload files to the directory using any FTP program you like.
- After uploading your files, open the CLICK_HERE_WHEN_FINISHED.htm file. This will activate the identifier, allowing people to view its metadata and download its files.
A known issue with this method is that it's not possible to put the identifier
in the speed_runs category.
As long as no valid solution to this is found, you might need to ask Radix,
the curator of that Archive category, to manually move the files to the
right category. He is usually online in the IRC channel #qdq @ irc.quakenet.org.
When the movie is obsoleted, remember to edit the description on the mirror
site to indicate that a newer, improved version is available. This also applies
to movies that are made available at Google Videos, Youtube and other online
viewing sites.
Streaming Media
We need help uploading our publications to our StreamingMedia accounts.
The goal of the site is to share high quality Tool-assisted Speedrun/Superplay (abbreviated TAS) movies to the world. Therefore, our most important contribution are TAS movies themselves!
Making a TAS movie requires a rerecording capable emulator.
Be sure to read our Guidelines before attempting a TAS. This page includes some instructional videos on TAS making as well.
Also be sure to read the Rules before submitting a TAS movie.
- Do you think you know a game you can make an entertaining TAS of?
- Do you think you could improve some existing movie?
You are more than welcome to try!
This site is a Wiki. Almost anyone can become an editor upon request. To do so, contact a site admin or admin assistant. Please mention if there is anything in particular you are hoping to contribute. Editors can edit the pages of this site and create new pages.
Check out the custom markup before you start.
Needed editing contributions
- Adding descriptions to published movies.
- Putting up screenshots on publications that have none. Read HowToMakePNG first.
- Adding TAS techniques to pages in the Game Resources. We are always desiring a greater body of knowledge of gaming techniques.
- Combing the http://tasvideos.org/forum wishlists and adding them to the ListOfIdeas as well as adding your own requests. It is important to keep this page up to date with good TAS ideas.
- Helping with the TODO.
- Writing a good TAS tutorial. Our site needs good instructional tutorials on how to get started making a TAS. Any TAS tutorial should be linked in the Guidelines.
People with coding experience are urgently needed.
Helping emulator development
This site depends on emulators capable of rerecording, most of which are open source. We are always in need of help from coders for maintaining and developing these emulators. Anyone interested in rerecording emulator development may look here.
We definitely want new good rerecording emulators. We greatly hope people will help improve emulators to meet our site requirements. Interested in adding rerecording tools but don't know of a particular emulator? See our list of potential emulators.
Coding for the site
Help is needed in expanding the capabilities of the site itself. Help is urgently needed by coders experienced in PHP and SQL.
The site is founded on publishing encoded movies. Without these, we have no site. Therefore, we are always looking for people capable of making good encodes.
Making quick encodes of submissions
These encodes aren't as demanding as our EncoderGuidelines. We like it when our submissions are encoded and put on a streaming media site. Preferably, contact a publisher about being added to our DailyMotion TASVideos-submissions group and adding the submission there.
Making encodes for publication
Accepted movies need to be published. Publication video files have more strict requirements.
Becoming a publisher
If you have encodes published on the site and feel you can contribute to the publication process, contact adelikat about becoming a publisher.
If you are an experienced TASer and meet the requirements you can apply to be a Judge. Contact adelikat.
Judges decide the fate of our submissions.
If all else fails, donate money!
This site does not make any money. It needs donations from its visitors to stay online. The server costs are currently about $45 per month (and needs to become 60 a month as soon as we can afford it).
Donations are accepted via PayPal.
Any donations are welcome. Specify if you want it to be anonymous to the public. As a bonus, donating also disables Ads for you while you are logged in.