The Crew Extra Videos

[Ross Scott]

This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here »

 

Due to popular demand, I'm releasing a couple more clips related to the last Game Dungeon episode. The first is for an extra-high quality copy (the same version I uploaded to Youtube) of the episode. Due to this episode having lots of fast motion and high details, it compressed very poorly compared to pretty much every other episode. To put it in perspective, I used even higher quality compression settings than this on A New Beginning, and that was 1/20th the size this one was. So for people who are frustrated by the compression, here's a downloadable version that has minimal artifacting:

 

Ross's Game Dungeon: The Crew (x264 9.44GB MKV)

 

This is meant for personal viewing only. Please do not upload copies of this to Youtube or other streaming networks. However, as with all my videos, Fair Use purposes (reviews, parodies, derivative works, etc.) are of course fine.

 

The other request I received was for the green screen footage of my driving segment in the video. These were not made under ideal conditions. I had time pressure and had to record this in my currently evacuated room. You'll see some shadowing that isn't helpful, but people can monkey with it if they want. I've included 3 takes of the shot.

 

Green screen driving video (x264 44MB MP4)

 

Unlike the Game Dungeon episode itself, you can use this clip for anything you want, no restrictions. I'm not necessarily saying you SHOULD, but I don't have a problem with it being used for whatever.

 

COMMENTS

[Veyrdite]

Thankyou Ross. Sorry this has been an extended saga.

 

 

Thou shalt not insult my Seamonkey. To the commandline!

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|              | |  | | /__\ |_| |/ ___ \ (__| | | | | | (_| |              |
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`===========================================================================´
[info: 01:38:42] Listening to petitions ... 
TRANSFERING ||#..........................................||(43/9669 MB: 0.44 %)

[Ross Scott]

I'm learning for the new website, I won't be able to host the files anymore, so I'm scrambling to find a backup for that. It could be Mega wasn't a good choice, let me know where and I can upload it somewhere else.

[BTGBullseye]

Torrenting is a good choice, just seed them once, and let the community do the rest.

[Veyrdite]

I've just finished watching the download. It's night and day difference compared to the youtube reel. So many birds! I didn't even realise there were aliasing issues before!

 

On that note: wet road aliasing. It's interesting that dry roads don't flicker in the distance, but wet roads do. Perhaps they forgot to implement mipmap filtering on that layer?

 

Anyway, onto more serious notes.

 

 

Video hosting and backups

 

I'm learning for the new website, I won't be able to host the files anymore, so I'm scrambling to find a backup for that. It could be Mega wasn't a good choice, let me know where and I can upload it somewhere else.

Services like Mega are brilliant short-term hosting for large amounts of data. But they're useless beyond that. I don't know what their business model is, and I don't know of any good alternatives, but in my experience all free file-hosting sites are transient.

 

I used to upload mods I made to such file hosting sites. Everyone did. This was a big mistake. My mods are gone forever. As are the modding histories of entire communities.

 

Have you ever visited a site that indexes mods and then tried to download one, only to find that it takes to you an external host that's now gone? Or that now demands money for an account?

 

 

You have a few options, all in various shades of grey:

 

(1) Make torrents and trust the community to keep the videos alive.

 

Whilst this might work and it's almost free, it's not a very accessible option for you or the users. Not many people will go through this just to watch one of your videos, and each video you release would require an individual torrent as you can't edit existing torrents to include new data. Messy and only for the 1% of viewers.

 

It might be worth doing this anyway (or encouraging someone to do this for you) just as a backup plan.

 

(2) Host them yourself.

 

At the end of the day: you are the only person you can trust to maintain motivation to keep them hosted.

 

(3) Hybrid HTTP + torrent website

 

Throw your hat into the experimental arena with something like peertube, which is a hybrid of options (1) and (2). Here's the Blender Foundation's instance which they setup after Youtube removed all of their videos because they didn't agree to enable advertising on them.

 

No idea how well this works in practice. Peertube is a trendy javascript-framework based thing that's sure to break in less than two years, so it's probably worth waiting for something more reliable to come out.

 

 

I won't be able to host the files anymore

This is a bit concerning. I'm not privvy to your plans and who you have organised them with, but what's going on here? New host too distant to move the collection to? Happy to chat via PM, email or voice if you want a sounding board, whilst I don't sell any hosting services myself I might at least be able to listen and perhaps give a different perspective.

 

 

Stutter

 

You mention stutter issues in the video. I could not see any evidence of this in the video segment you use as an example, but with this higher quality copy I'm noticing it everywhere.

 

Shortlist of mm:ss codes:

• 8:14 Car rotation during cutscene. Could just be pre-animated and not lerped.
  
• 14:19 Bus judder
  
• 22:35 Rushmore judder
  
• 23:53 Camera rotation judder at "Cloud Gate"

 

The bus judder is a good example. I dumped all the frames and tracked a single spot (rear mini-blinker) on the bus as it traveled across the screen:

 

 

Those spacings should not be so uneven.

 

Several possible causes I can think of:

• Frame skipping. This explains the 1/3 then 2/3 spacings above. Could be caused either by the game, graphics drivers or the video capture process itself.
  
• Asynchronous (threaded) or similar code (scheduled jobs in one thread) that's providing uneven lock delays or job loads each frame, so each frame legitimately takes a different amount of time to complete. Requires time optimising the code to fix.
  
• Bad timer resolution. Many lazy devs (*looks sideways*) use millisecond time sources because they're easier to get and don't always overflow as often as the higher-res sources. On its own it's impossible to notice 1ms jitter, but if you code things badly a few dozen or more of these errors can pile up each frame.

 

"The age old tradition of fixing software problems by throwing more hardware at them" can actually make this last problem worse.

[ScumCoder]

Anyway, onto more serious notes.

Wow, that was an awesome analysis. Kudos dude.

[ScumCoder]

I'm learning for the new website, I won't be able to host the files anymore

Whoa, that seems like a HUGE downgrade. I'm not sure if fixing any and all disadvantages of the current website (which I fail to see, but that's just me) are worth losing such a crucial function.

[Veelk]

Hey Ross, would you be willing to upload the direct files of all your videos?

 

You know how paranoid you are about downloading a software patch that screws your system? I'm half paranoid about videos being taken down, half just a sort of digital pack-rat. If I find a series I enjoy, I download the videos from the youtube channel and store them in folders. I even edit some of them, like combining all your two parters into one video for easy viewing.

 

I'd love to have clean versions of everything you've done.

[Ross Scott]

I'm learning for the new website, I won't be able to host the files anymore

Whoa, that seems like a HUGE downgrade. I'm not sure if fixing any and all disadvantages of the current website (which I fail to see, but that's just me) are worth losing such a crucial function.

I was only informed of this a couple days ago. I'm not happy about it either, however the new site does have definite advantages. What I may do is see if people want to volunteer for mirrors and have multiple links for some of the larger files.

 

 

Hey Ross, would you be willing to upload the direct files of all your videos?

 

You know how paranoid you are about downloading a software patch that screws your system? I'm half paranoid about videos being taken down, half just a sort of digital pack-rat. If I find a series I enjoy, I download the videos from the youtube channel and store them in folders. I even edit some of them, like combining all your two parters into one video for easy viewing.

 

I'd love to have clean versions of everything you've done.

Bottom line is make it easy for me and I don't have much of a problem with it. I think for a while I wasn't in a rush, since I was having copies of the videos uploaded on Youtube, then that Russian site laid a copyright claim on me using copies of my own videos, but that's hopefully died down some.

 

 

On that note: wet road aliasing. It's interesting that dry roads don't flicker in the distance, but wet roads do. Perhaps they forgot to implement mipmap filtering on that layer?

This is extremely common in many games that have some sort of reflection effect via the shaders. I recorded the game with MSAA since I don't think it supported anything higher than that. That does nothing for shader aliasing and alpha textures. It's something that's bothered me ever since DirectX 9 honestly. I'm glad we're slowly moving towards higher res displays so that all this stuff isn't as in your face.

[BTGBullseye]

For the file hosting, you might want to consider Bayfiles... https://torrentfreak.com/former-pirate-bay-cyberlocker-bayfiles-makes-a-comeback-180718/

[ThatOneDraffan]

Bumping an old post here, I would be interested if anyone happens to still have that higher-quality version on the episode on the system. I like to backup great shows to my own media server and a source file would be very desirable. I'd also be willing to seed a torrent of the files indefinitely (as long as my personal server is up, which I plan to keep for as long as possible).

[BTGBullseye]

2 hours ago, ThatOneDraffan said:

Bumping an old post here, I would be interested if anyone happens to still have that higher-quality version on the episode on the system. I like to backup great shows to my own media server and a source file would be very desirable. I'd also be willing to seed a torrent of the files indefinitely (as long as my personal server is up, which I plan to keep for as long as possible).

I think I was the only one that managed the download of it, but I lost it due to a permanent HDD failure. (don't seed torrents from spinning rust)

[ekket]

3 hours ago, ThatOneDraffan said:

Bumping an old post here, I would be interested if anyone happens to still have that higher-quality version on the episode on the system. I like to backup great shows to my own media server and a source file would be very desirable. I'd also be willing to seed a torrent of the files indefinitely (as long as my personal server is up, which I plan to keep for as long as possible).

I could ask Ross to re-upload it, actually. For now, you should seed these:

 

Freeman's Mind 1 Torrent

 

[ScumCoder]

On 9/21/2020 at 11:04 AM, ekket said:

I could ask Ross to re-upload it, actually

No need for that, I have the file.

 

 

The only thing I need is an announce URL.

The torrents you linked have no such URL; does that mean you just used DHT to seed them?

[ekket]

1 hour ago, ScumCoder said:

No need for that, I have the file.

 

 

The only thing I need is an announce URL.

The torrents you linked have no such URL; does that mean you just used DHT to seed them?

They're both trackerless torrents (DHT with PEX), yeah.

[ScumCoder]

41 minutes ago, ekket said:

They're both trackerless torrents (DHT with PEX), yeah.

@ThatOneDraffan Here you go. I have no f*cking clue how long it takes for DHT to catch up so prepare to wait.

rgd_thecrew.mkv.torrent

[BTGBullseye]

10 hours ago, ScumCoder said:

@ThatOneDraffan Here you go. I have no f*cking clue how long it takes for DHT to catch up so prepare to wait.

rgd_thecrew.mkv.torrent 23.8 kB · 4 downloads

You know, you can always add trackers to it on your own... You'll get seeders faster. I use this list myself:

 

https://github.com/ngosang/trackerslist

 

Constantly updated for good and bad trackers, so you can even blacklist known bad trackers from your client. (it will remove them automatically)

[ScumCoder]

Wheee, I finally got a leech! Although... he is from China

(Also I must say that I followed Bullseye's advice and added trackers... for some reason it didn't help much)

[BTGBullseye]

4 hours ago, ScumCoder said:

(Also I must say that I followed Bullseye's advice and added trackers... for some reason it didn't help much)

Not many people looking for this torrent. They're mostly looking for the latest movie/album release, not old youtube videos.

Edited October 26, 2020 by BTGBullseye (see edit history)

[ScumCoder]

9 hours ago, BTGBullseye said:

Not many people looking for this torrent. They're mostly looking for the latest movie/album release, not old youtube videos.

Well, at the time of this writing the torrent was downloaded by 11 people. Plus, as you remember, I created it because ThatOneDraffan specifically asked for it. So I'm pretty sure at least some people were actively trying to download it for the better part of past month

 

P.S. I think the actual reason is that those trackers should have been added by the leechers as well for the announce system to work. I guess I should have made a post here about that. Whoops...

Edited October 26, 2020 by ScumCoder (see edit history)