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More than doubled, actually. Anyways, it's very good to see that Ross is getting through the adpocalypse (mostly) unscathed

That isn't the best of incentives for donating, since you can just use one of the extremely large amount of scripts for downloading Youtube videos. Although, I wouldn't mind Ross putting the raw footage (basically all of the video and voiceovers) for the videos as an incentive. It wouldn't be time-consuming at all and would please the fans that are fine with anything that has Ross in it.

From my experience, crowdsourcing subtitles with that mostly yields lower-quality subtitles (for larger channels, at least) and there isn't a way to put up guidelines for subtitles on there, IIRC.

It's eastern time.

Yeah, you're pretty right on that, but Google should have given it a lot more training data and time to work with, since (for example) confabulating offensive content with the unedited Q&A session that is the videochat is very worrying.

Google should probably realize that you can't have the rigurous checking for offensive content that television has with just some neural network that scans the metadata and whatever it can get from the audiovisual content of the video. They have a lot of knowledge on this topic (like Deepdream, and the algorithm they're using for recommendations), so I don't get why they're making it so trigger-happy with demonetizing videos. But hey, at least the advertisers are happy and Youtube isn't making that much money, so why try and fix all the obvious false positives?

This post should clarify Ross's stance on fandubs. You probably should ask Ross at rosswscott[at]gmail.com for a version with no voice over when the movie gets released.

That is more than a bit worrisome, especially because Google (understandably so) is trying to get every website to switch over to HTTPS by prioritizing them in search results and Mozilla is doing the same with having warnings in Firefox for HTTP sites as well

Yeah, that's not secure for passwords at all, you need to get that sorted out

You could try using youtube-dl as a last resort (I don't think there's a simple way to get it to VLC though, although mpv also has built-in support for opening youtube videos but that's through CLI as with youtube-dl)

Ross is currently using the original 2004 HL2 because he feels that it has better (darker) lighting (although I think he mentioned the 2004 one has some issues with the airboat sequence)

I did notice some mistakes for the subtitles in the first part of the review. At 8:22 you forgot a word in "This walkthrough was written the lead writer of the game". Also wouldn't "he was reading a porno magazine" be the correct grammar instead of "he's reading a porno magazine" at 12:56? Also, in the second part, isn't Granny at 10:15 saying "Prom-mo-mo-bring" instead of "Tra la la!" and the red shoes at 24:18 singing "'Bout a horse named Blues, a cow named Moos" instead?

Hey everyone, I'm going to repeat this on the next videochat, but I wanted to publicly clarify an incident that came up recently. On March 31st, as I was uploading the Maabus episode, I discovered that I had TWELVE copyright claims against me, mostly for Freeman's Mind. I took a screenshot of the incident here illustrating it: I was quite upset about this, because not only was the company trying to claim ownership of the videos and take revenue from it, but actions like this could threaten the existence of my whole channel. After some consultation with other Youtubers (thanks especially to Shane Luis from the ReRez channel), I disputed all the claims against me AND laid counter-claims to all my videos on their channel, where they were quickly taken down. I've been contacted by some people upset over these actions as they thought I was being mean spirited, but in my eyes, I had no choice; they were acting like a rabid dog and had to be put down. During this time, I also emailed a few contacts who had worked at stopgame.ru in the past, only to be informed later that the channel making claims against me is NOT their channel, it's a fake posing as them. If that's correct, that really makes this channel look bad. I am actually curious what led to them doing that, you would think trying to do a takedown on the actual creator when you're the one taking the videos in the first place would not be a wise move for your company. This whole incident brings up another issue regarding translations, so I would like to clarify my stance on that. To date, not one cent has ever gone to me for dubbed copies of my videos in other languages. Even for the REAL stopgame.ru channel making dubbed translations, I've never been completely thrilled with them making those, monetizing them, and me receiving 0% of the earnings. The analogy I make would be like taking a foreign film, making a dubbed translation of it, then selling that and keeping all the profits. Even though the translator and dubber did their own work, I imagine the original creator did more. However, I realize that dubbed copies reach a wider audience than English ones would alone, so I've mostly just tolerated this stuff, having mixed feelings about it and generally being too busy to pursue it further. So rather than leave things hazy, I wanted to clarify what my exact stance is on translations: Subtitle translations: I'm happy to accept fan-made foreign subtitles. Please email [email protected] if you have some in another language you would like to submit. Don't use my normal email address for this or it will take forever to process this. You can give yourself credit at the beginning or end of the subtitle files themselves. In the event of more than one submission for the same video, we'll try our best to use the better one. I would prefer you NOT upload copies of my videos with the subtitles added on your own channel. Dubbed audio translations that are non-monetized: If you make a dubbed translation of my videos but it is NOT monetized, (so in other words, no ads running on it and it is just a fan made project), that's fine. Dubbed audio translations that ARE monetized: If you make a dubbed translation of my videos that IS monetized, I would prefer you give me SOMETHING for it. I'm not good at figuring out what is a fair percentage (maybe people have suggestions in the comments), but I do feel like 0% of the earnings is a little low. This stuff can add up over time, the channel whose videos I made claims against likely got over 1-2 million views collectively for all my videos together. I imagine it's a similar story for other places hosting fan-dubbed translations. Since Youtube does not make payment an easy or practical process (or some videos are hosted off Youtube), you can always just send me a payment via Paypal, or hell, even with Bitcoin + an email (address: 1DCs8dQ7vRi99qQdfQFurxxm5rT29DRTpL). So if you ARE profiting off my videos and want to be legit about it, send a payment of whatever you think a fair percentage is to Paypal address [email protected] with a message saying it's for monetizing the dubbed copies. Do NOT use the donation page for this, that's processed differently than actual business transactions. If you do this, then that's evidence you're acting legally and with my permission (assuming you're not giving me 30 cents when you've earned 00 or something). Doing this once a year would be fine. If you have any questions about this, you can contact me at my normal email address. I'm not expecting much to come of this. I figure the people making money off my stuff without my permission probably aren't particularly keen on the honor system either, but at least I can have a policy about this now. I really hate getting involved in stuff like this, I don't want to be a person grubbing every last cent out of people and ultimately, this is probably a minority of earnings. There's a pretty low risk of me coming after anyone about this, I'd rather just focus on the videos. But at the same time, people selling stuff you worked on and keeping all the money can rub you the wrong way psychologically. That's it! Hopefully this stuff never comes up again! This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here »

I was invited a couple days ago to appear on the Valve News Network Youtube channel for a podcast the host, Tyler McVicker, set up. We talked mostly about virtual reality, Valve news and Valve games in general, then Tyler had a lot to say about the band Coldplay; I'm not sure if I was the right guest for that part. I think the podcast could have been a little more structured, but it went well enough. Also it has a surprise ending! Anyway, it's above if you want to check it out. In the meantime, I'm mostly just trying to catch up on emails and set up some work for future videos. I hope to have another one this month, and hopefully a few for February. This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here »

Normally I don't make posts related to news events, but since I literally think this is the most important topic in gaming now (plus about a dozen people have emailed me about this), I'm making an exception on this. Many people have reported now that the Library of Congress now allows cracking single-player games to be legal. This may sound cynical of me, but I feel like too many people are viewing this as something worthy of dancing in the streets and solving the problems of dead games. In my opinion, this barely solves anything. From an article I read on the matter, the following is stated: "The LoC placed some important limitations on this new legal right, though. For one, gamers can't legally work to restore online gameplay in titles that required a defunct central server to coordinate such play." This makes this new legal status almost worthless in my eyes for a few reasons: 1. While there were some exceptions, cracks to single player games (like at gamecopyworld.com) and abandonware games have more or less been operating out in the open. While giving these cracks legal status is definitely a positive thing by itself, I think it comes at a cost (below): 2. This does nothing to help games like Battleforge. In a sense, this is worse than nothing, because it reinforces that the practice of keeping online-only games is illegal. 3. While this legal status might be more important for places like museums, for the average person that actually wants to play the game, the legality is relatively inconsequential. People have been making cracks for decades and working on MMO server emulators for years without much regard to their legal status. While this sometimes leads to some legal conflict, I'm not aware of any server emulators for DEAD games that have been shut down completely due to the law. Besides, this new ruling says getting dead online-only games working is still illegal anyway. 4. This really does nothing to address the source of the problem, which I feel is that companies shouldn't be allowed to operate commercially if they're killing games with no end-of-life plan for them whatsoever. While I'm sure there's a better annd less hyperbolic analogy than this, what comes to mind reading this is something like "Good news! It's now illegal to whip your slaves UNLESS they've tried to run away!" rather than trying to limit slavery itself. I'm of course not trying to equate killing games with something as serious as slavery (I'm tired while typing this, it was the first analogy that came to mind), rather my point is that it's still completely backwards where we're focusing our attention on this. The Library of Congress is treating people who want to play dead games LESS like criminals instead of addressing how harmful this practice is to culture to begin with. Anyway, sorry to burst people's bubbles with this, I just thought I should make a post on this before I got 20 more emails on the topic. - - - ADHD version: Ross says the ruling by the Library of Congress of being able to restore games isn't that big a deal and doesn't help save the most at-risk games at all. This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here »

Youtube Download 1280x720 MKV (148MB) Merry Valve-Time Christmas! This episode is obviously late for a lot of reasons, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. This episode ended up taking massively longer than it was supposed to and was meant to be an "easy" episode. It was actually supposed to be the second part of a sub-series idea I had for Civil Protection, called "Community Outreach" episodes. The idea was that I would take viewer questions pretending to be City 17 citizens, pick ones I liked, then have Mike and Dave answer them on-camera. I thought this would be a fast way to get episodes out, but too many things in the Source engine ended up slowing me down. I still think the idea has potential at some point in the future however. This is also the first episode where the majority of the animation (maybe 90%) is done via motion capture. While both "Morning Patrol" and "The Tunnel" used a few motion capture animations, this is the first one where I acted out the major parts myself. I think the results are mixed. The raw animations are quite jittery, so I had to smooth them out substantially. This leads to some slightly awkward movements in places, but I think the technology has a lot of potential and can save a bunch of time, depending on how dynamic the animation is. Finally, this is likely going to be the last Civil Protection episode done on the Source engine. While I have almost no problems with the general look of the engine, the behind-the-scenes work involved with creating the episodes is just too massive for what I'm trying to do. While I plan to eventually make future CP episodes with Half-Life content ported over, it's going to be a long time, as I'm going to be focusing on trying to create an actual full-length movie this year (and more Freeman's Mind). I still don't know what software I'll be using in the future, though my first priority is to be able to easily create lots of characters capable of facial expressions and lip-sync and then see what's compatible with that. This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here »

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