Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
adelikat has discussed something of importance on the IRC channel.
The sites torrents.
As you may have noticed, every single published TAS is now watchable via a video streaming website, and in many cases, the video websites have actually had higher quality encoding techniques (Mostly in relation to bitrate) then the actual published encodes. Also keep in mind we also have the very reliable Archive.org to download from.
We wish to ask this, do you want published encodes to be made under more lenient circumstances? For example, rather then a bitrate of 350 for Sonic the Hedgehog (Mega Drive) causing lossy artifacts, we double it and eliminate the issues while creating a larger file? Or stick to the small filesize?
The ask this because we have gotten to the point that for 'perfect' quality, we've wound up with some games massively overblowing the 4 to 1 ratio, in Crash Bandicoots case, it has almost exceeded 12 to 1 for 'perfect' quality.
So we ask you, the audience, how do you wish that future encodes on TASVideos.org be processed?
I say perfect FTW. I download torrents because I want to be able to watch them when I want to, without having to wait for buffers. I also enjoy looking at nice videos, devoid of artifacts.
I am willing to wait longer for my torrent to finish if it means the video looks more natural (i.e. like I am watching it from an emulator)
adelikat wrote:
I very much agree with this post.
Bobmario511 wrote:
Forget party hats, Christmas tree hats all the way man.
Wasn't this discussed already in another thread? One opinion (which I agree with) was that precisely because now people can watch acceptable-quality versions of the videos streamed directly to their browsers, the versions distributed through bittorrent ought to be of maximal quality because of their intended use (ie. because most people downloading the video will usually want to watch it fullscreen at maximum quality, or use it for derivative works).
(Of course that doesn't mean that space should be wasted. The bitrate should still be as tight as possible once the desired visual quality has been achieved.)
I agree about high quality used for media files distributed via BitTorrent, however I, for one, am quite satisfied with modest bitrates roughly equivalent to quantizer 21–23 for H.264 video and q1.5–q2.5 for Vorbis audio.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Joined: 10/28/2007
Posts: 1360
Location: The dark horror in the back of your mind
From the original post, you would think that our current encoding guidelines result in videos that are full of artifacts and unwatchable.
This is far from the case.
It is not particularly challenging in most cases to achieve an encode with, say, 95% of the quality of having a lossless video stream (putting the audio issue aside at this point) while having a substantially smaller file than such a stream would entail. Past that point you're basically dealing with an exponential increase in size for a minimal at best increase in quality.
Spending an extra several hours downloading a marginally better video just isn't worth it.
I must also point out that not everybody has connections that allow for streaming from video sites, whether this be a speed issue or some other technical issue preventing the site from streaming properly. The torrents are invaluable for our viewers that would like to be able to watch our videos uninterrupted.
Having our torrents only be of the high quality variety is an exceptionally bad idea. I can accept there being more than one torrent where one conforms to our current guidelines and one is of the high quality sort, but I cannot emphasise enough that only having one is a bad idea.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
I have not felt that any encodes as of late have been lacking in anyway. I am quite happy with them.
I also agree with Warp's sentiments.
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.
Having our torrents only be of the high quality variety is an exceptionally bad idea. I can accept there being more than one torrent where one conforms to our current guidelines and one is of the high quality sort, but I cannot emphasise enough that only having one is a bad idea.
Imo torrents are useless, it was good back then when everybody had small bandwidth, this situation has clearly changed nowaday.
Personally i never downloaded any published tas trought torrent, and im surely not alone in the same case, im sure torrent represent the slowest distribution method around, if we had tracker statistics and just compare between years, its pretty sure the average number of download trough torrent as decreased, at some point only the "vets" encoders/watchers will use it, the archive.org link getting "online" way before the torrent anyway (while movie is in bench....).
I say personnally just remove torrents, its redundant and not used, at best.
Actually, BitTorrent allows for much higher speeds compared to any HTTP-based download. For more-or-less popular torrents, I can reach over 1.5 MB/s easily, while Archive peaks at about 300–350 KB/s for me. This is actually important if you want high quality encodes, as those weigh a lot.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Yeah except the speed you describe is on very popular torrent like 24 show, or iso ect... not for TAS (not for long at least), they are not that popular torrent at all.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
adelikat wrote:
Nach wrote:
I have not felt that any encodes as of late have been lacking in anyway. I am quite happy with them.
And many of them as of late have been breaking the traditional 4:1 ratio.
That doesn't mean we should aim to break it.
Although I think it can warrant us to raise the bar a bit. Perhaps to 5:1 or even 6:1.
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.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
adelikat wrote:
Nach wrote:
adelikat wrote:
Nach wrote:
I have not felt that any encodes as of late have been lacking in anyway. I am quite happy with them.
And many of them as of late have been breaking the traditional 4:1 ratio.
That doesn't mean we should aim to break it.
Although I think it can warrant us to raise the bar a bit. Perhaps to 5:1 or even 6:1.
Aiming to break it wasn't my point. My point is that you have been happy with movies that do break it, not the other way around.
Well, I can't say I've seen all the ones that do break it.
Although thinking more about this, the ones that do break it I believe are on PSX or N64, correct?
Perhaps we should enforce system based ratios.
4:1 is too high for say DMG, but for new systems we've added or will be adding, it is also too low.
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.
Joined: 10/28/2007
Posts: 1360
Location: The dark horror in the back of your mind
Nach wrote:
Although thinking more about this, the ones that do break it I believe are on PSX or N64, correct?
Actually, these are a minority, as far as published encodes are concerned.
Using the movie statistics module, of newer movies that break the ratio, they are for DS, DS, Genesis, arcade, arcade, PSX, PSX, and SNES.
Of these, only the first two break a 6:1 ratio, and even then I believe that encodes for those could have been made that were within that if not within 4:1.
EDIT:
adelikat wrote:
And many of them as of late have been breaking the traditional 4:1 ratio.
I feel compelled to point out that the above list doesn't exactly qualify as "many", given how many movies we've had published in a roughly comparable time period (if you want to restrict it to just 2009, knock the last item off the above list).
Oh, and if you're confused as to how I managed to get the above movies from the statistics module: the module shows compression ratio as (seconds per MB), whereas 4:1 is MB per minute, or one minute per 4 MB, or 60 seconds per 4 MB, for 15 s / MB, so any movie on the module showing less than 15.0 on the statistics module exceeds the 4:1 ratio. Look down at the bottom of the sandbox if you want to see the worst 100 compression ratios using this module.
Joined: 10/28/2007
Posts: 1360
Location: The dark horror in the back of your mind
Let's start with roughly six months ago, when the first of those was published. We've published 116 movies inclusive since then, of which 7 (the above list less the last one) are over the 4:1 ratio.
7/116 ~= 6%. Again, 6% doesn't really qualify as "many".
The trend I see is that the movies which seem to exceed 4:1 are for DS, arcade, or PSX, all of which admit higher resolutions than the site normally sees (although neither of the above PSX runs actually uses a higher resolution, so I must question the utility of ratio-breaking there other than that nobody else provided an encode and that the encoder responsible did not see if lower settings would be acceptable).
To be fair, in the case of DS videos at least, I can see there's a fair chance that due to the added resolution exceeding the ratio might be needed to achieve acceptable visual quality. An argument can be made for increasing the ratio, but not to arbitrarily high limits, and not for all platforms; if there is an increase in the ratio I'd advise putting guidelines in place for deeming what is acceptable for platforms where high ratios are absolutely unnecessary (for example, lossless video and acceptable audio can fairly readily be achieved on the Game Boy within a 2:1 ratio).
(although neither of the above PSX runs actually uses a higher resolution, so I must question the utility of ratio-breaking there other than that nobody else provided an encode and that the encoder responsible did not see if lower settings would be acceptable)
I don't believe this is true, since the current posted encode still has visible artifacts, though minor. Lowering the bitrate would just increase the artifacts.
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
(3573)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee
Ok, this wasn't intended to be a thread where encoders argue over bitrates.
It was intended to get simple user feedback. Is downloading higher quality movies at a larger filesize desireable?
I'd like to see bittorrent as lossless. But that's just me.
Lossless would be good, but only if it doesn't make the video file humongously large and/or require an obscure codec (possibly available for a limited amount of systems/players).
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
Warp wrote:
OmnipotentEntity wrote:
I'd like to see bittorrent as lossless. But that's just me.
Lossless would be good, but only if it doesn't make the video file humongously large and/or require an obscure codec (possibly available for a limited amount of systems/players).
There is a lossless variant of H.264 that works with any recent installation of ffdshow, we already have several runs published under it (Such as Little Master or Urban Champion if I recall correctly).
