First videos added to the site

[Harrison]

I've just added the first demoscene videos to the site.

These consist of two full length videos of the original Amiga demos for Hardwired by The Silents & Crionics, and Desert Dream by Kefrens.

I also have a video for State of the Art by Spaceballs, but that demo isn't yet added to the site. As soon as it is I will link the video in.

Here are the current two videos:

Hardwired by The Silents & Crionics (http://www.classicamiga.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1372&Itemid=102)

Desert Dream by Kefrens (http://www.classicamiga.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1168&Itemid=102)

[Teho]

Those were really well captured. Due to the way the title of those were displayed, I'm pretty sure those were rips from the Mindcandy 2 DVD. But it's been awhile since I watched that so am not 100% sure. Anyway, having those on the site is pretty cool, I definitely want to see more of those! :)

I've added State of The Art (http://www.classicamiga.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4346&Itemid=102) to the site. Still needs screens and a download link, I don't have time to do them at the moment.

[Demon Cleaner]

That looks awesome :thumbs:

[Puni/Void]

Don't worry, Teho, I'll take care of it this evening. :)

I'm very impressed by the quality of the videos included. Like Teho said, it's great to have such stuff on the site. As far as I know, this is something that isn't offered in similar sites like ours. Keep up the good work!

Edit:

Screenshots has been done, along with two download links and a link to the HD installer.

It was nice watching this classic production again.

[Harrison]

Yes, the videos are taken from the Mindcandy II DVD. Someone else uploaded them to Google Video so I thought we should take advantage of their hard work. No point into redoing what has already been completed.

I will add the State of the Art video to the site today.

I'm also going to hunt through some of the video sites today to see if anyone else has uploads any good quality videos of productions. If they have then we might as well take advantage and link them into the site.

I will also see what game related ones I can find.

If any of you also find some good game or demo videos on youtube, google etc don't forget to add them into the site too. It's very easy to do and is much like adding MP3s.

Just add {youtube}video id{/youtube}

or {google}video id{/google}

or {yahoo}video id{/yahoo}

etc...

The video id is the bit normally at the end of the video clips URL and is normally easy to spot, but if your unsure PM me the video URL and I will either let you know the correct but to use or just add the video in myself..

The video playback code on classicamiga supports pretty much all know video networks so try linking any you find, or ask if you are unsure of the code needed and i will let you know.

[Submeg]

the vid quality is very nice. Liking the vids :thumbs:

[Teho]

Don't worry, Teho, I'll take care of it this evening.

Thanks, I really didn't have time myself as I was getting ready to leave for the weekend. Didn't actually have time to create the entry either, but as I was mentioning Mindcandy 2 I remembered that it has all the details for the prods on it in its booklet. So it was quick to do.

Makes me think I should enter the rest that aren't allready on the site as well.

[Harrison]

I've now added the video for "State of the Art".

Is the last screenshot correct for that demo?

[Puni/Void]

That screenshot might seem a bit out of place, but it does belong to the demo as far as I can remember.

[Teho]

It definitely belongs. There is a small vectorpart in there where the camera sits in the middle of a rotating object.

I've been adding some screenshots this evening, and searched youtube for videos of the ones I've worked on as well. So now we also have videos of

CNCD & Parallax: Deep - The Psilocybin Mix (http://www.classicamiga.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1635&Itemid=102)

CNCD: Closer (http://www.classicamiga.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1634&Itemid=102) - Poor quality, sadly. Almost didn't include it.

Spaceballs: 9 Fingers (http://www.classicamiga.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4352&Itemid=102)

[Harrison]

Great. :)

I see what you mean about Closer. The contrast is quite bad making it hard to see a lot of the graphics. Also I seem to remember it running much smoother on my Amiga than it is in that video. Some of the sections seem to really slow down to 1 fps.

Did you notice that youtube has a lot of other CNCD demo videos too? I will add the one for Killer.

To make it possible to search for games and demos that include videos and audio files I'm going to add a couple of tick boxes to the edit page today. Therefore when adding a video or audio file to a page if you could all tick the box for "video" or "audio" then when someone does a search using the left hand advanced search window they will be able to tick video and audio to search directly for all demos and games that contain either.

As you don't yet have many videos on the site this isn't too much hassle to quickly go back and edit these pages to tick the boxes, but it might take a bit longer for audio as I know quite a few audio clips have now been added to both the game and demo sections. If you have added any please can you spend some time going back and ticking them all so we have the search up to date.

I'm going to add these tick boxes today so expect them to be a part of the site sometimes this afternoon.

[Harrison]

I think I've now updated all of the demo entries that have videos so they are included when searching for productions with videos included.

Demo Videos (http://www.classicamiga.com/index.php?option=com_jreviews&task=list&query=all&jr_demovideo=video&order=alpha&Itemid=167)

To Staff: Please edit and tick the Video Included tick box if I've missed any out. (See Staff/Site Content for more info).

[Demon Cleaner]

The videos aren't top quality, a bit blurry, but they are good enough.

[Harrison]

That is more down to how YouTube and other video hosting sites compress their videos into Flash video when you upload them. It reduces the filesizes and streaming rates by a lot using blurring techniques.

I think that once I know the site is no longer sometimes causing the server to crash every so often (hopefully I found the cause the other day) then I am going to consider hosting the originals of these video files on our server so we have much better quality video to show visitors. But I do also need to work out what sort of impact that might have on our bandwidth traffic and if that could slow the site down. We will see. For the moment I'm sticking with the streaming web videos just so we get a load onto the site.

[AlexJ]

Is there an efficent lossless (PNG like) encoder for video that could be used with game videos at least?

[Harrison]

There are a lot of lossless codecs available, but due to how lossless works the files can end up huge. But there are also lossless Flash video encoders available so that may work by first creating a lossless encoded video file capture from a game and then feeding it through the Flash encoder. I've not tried it this way though so don't know what sort of quality or final filesizes you would get.

I can see your logic behind wanting to use a lossless codec as you should be able to restrict to just the 32/256 colours in actual use on the Amiga when capturing the video. But equally this might produce very large files as it would probably need to store each individual frame much like the mjpeg video format used by older video editing systems. In contrast with a format like MPEG or DivX every frame of video isn't stored in the file. Instead a reference keyframe is stored every so many specified frames, and reference data is then stored between these frame for the differences between the last keyframe and the next. This is why when you skip through a DixV film it sometimes takes a few seconds for the video to clean up as it needs to reach the next keyframe to obtain a full image.

The blurring and sometimes jerky framerates seen in YouTube and other video site streams are due to this keyframe technique. These sites reduce the framerate and bit rate of all files you upload to them, as well as applying blurring techniques and reducing the number of key frames per second to minimise the final filesize and therefore lower the bandwidth required to stream them. Even if you upload good quality videos to youtube you will not always get good end results.

As for local files on our own server, we don't have those issues, although we do still need to consider size and streaming speed because if a video file is quite large people will give up waiting for it to stream and start to play. This is the other reason for youtube's harsh compression. When you watch one of their video's they will normally start to playback within a few seconds of clicking play and won't normally drop out and pause while they buffer more data. Which is a common problem with bigger videos that require more bandwidth.

Therefore we need to find a balance so that we can create files that are small enough that they begin streaming back footage within seconds of playback, but that don't blur or become pixelated or jerky.

I will be experimenting very soon with a lot of different codecs and compression techniques to find what the best sets and codecs are for the site. I will capture a series of video sequences from Amiga games and demos and then play around with lots of different codecs and encoding techniques. I will then post the best results so you can all decide which we should go for. Then we will hopefully have what we think are the best settings to use for our videos.

[Teho]

I see what you mean about Closer. The contrast is quite bad making it hard to see a lot of the graphics. Also I seem to remember it running much smoother on my Amiga than it is in that video. Some of the sections seem to really slow down to 1 fps.

I know, it's a really bad encoding. I tried downloading the video linked at pouet.net thinking I'd upload that if it was better, and it turns out it's the same one. Makes sense actually. But fortunately, I did in the end uh.. 'find' a much better version of it which I have linked to instead. Much prettier now. :)

Would be great if we could host our own videos like you're discussing now. Hopefully you can find a good quality vs size balance, so it won't be a problem with storage space and bandwidth usage. Looking forward to seeing what you find out. :)

[Harrison]

The new one is much better. Its hard to believe its the same demo!

I'm wondering if the other one was recorded on an Amiga that wasn't quite powerful enough to run it at full speed. :unsure:

[Puni/Void]

@Teho


Would be great if we could host our own videos like you're discussing now. Hopefully you can find a good quality vs size balance, so it won't be a problem with storage space and bandwidth usage. Looking forward to seeing what you find out.

Any news concerning the hosting of videos, Harrison?

[Harrison]

You can already upload and host videos on the classicamiga server. Details of the ftp upload details are available in the staff ftp pinned topic, and how to link to them on the site is in the staff tutorials.