SDA becoming less relevant?

2013-02-18 09:43:30 am

1-Up!

You don't need a supercomputer to produce sda-quality video...

people continuing to spread sterotypes like this are the reason why people don't give sda a chance.

Piston

2013-02-18 10:00:43 am

Heh, amateurs...

Quote from nate:

i'm curious - what is it specifically you are having trouble meeting in terms of quality standards? i'm a little surprised to hear that from the pc side since i mostly think of interlaced video as the killer and you almost never have to deal with that with pc screen capture.

Lagging the game out is my biggest concern. The games I play on PC are so unstable when dealing with recording, window capture, and responsiveness of the game. I don't always have the privilege of another monitor, so its a major hassle.

PJ

2013-02-18 10:47:34 am

Is PJ

Quote from Flip:

You don't need a supercomputer to produce sda-quality video...

people continuing to spread sterotypes like this are the reason why people don't give sda a chance.

Very this. I see people complaining in streams about how annoying it is to record high quality videos. Even some broadcasters complain about this WHILE STREAMING AT A HIGHER RESOLUTION THAN SDA REQUIRES. It's just blatant laziness, imo. Why spend hundreds of hours trying to complete a speed run only to have it sit in your Twitch highlights which barely work? Uploading to Youtube is just as much work as submitting to SDA.

nate

2013-02-18 10:52:09 am

Quote from c0urtney19:

Quote from nate:

i'm curious - what is it specifically you are having trouble meeting in terms of quality standards? i'm a little surprised to hear that from the pc side since i mostly think of interlaced video as the killer and you almost never have to deal with that with pc screen capture.

Lagging the game out is my biggest concern. The games I play on PC are so unstable when dealing with recording, window capture, and responsiveness of the game. I don't always have the privilege of another monitor, so its a major hassle.

this is good to know. i assume you're talking about fraps. i think there is probably room for better screen capture software.

moooh

2013-02-18 11:37:39 am

Exoray

People wanting to use the kb more will be happy to know then that there's forces in motion already for making it more standardized, easier to use and a lot more clean and updated.

presjpolk

2013-02-18 01:37:53 pm

HELLO!

That's great, because starting next month I'll have more time to do more work documenting the ins and outs of doing this stuff on a Mac.

Piston

2013-02-18 02:30:20 pm

Heh, amateurs...

@nate

I gave up on Fraps. Unfortunately I use Xsplit for recordings, watermark included.

Kiyura

2013-02-18 02:48:34 pm

Wiiaboo

I can confirm that fraps is a dirty whore.

Blubbler

2013-02-18 03:22:21 pm

I see this problem with very popular games mainly. Zelda and Mario runs get obsoleted all the time, so it's understandable you don't want to wait half a year for publication and have your run obsoleted 10 times by then. But with the majority of games, I don't feel like that they really have another place on the internet.

Paraxade

2013-02-18 03:31:57 pm

Yeah fraps is the biggest problem for me too. After spending a few hundred dollars on my computer I still can't record HD video without serious lag, and I'm not blowing any more money on it anytime soon.

Orchisawesome

2013-02-18 04:21:26 pm

Quote from PJ:

Quote from Flip:

You don't need a supercomputer to produce sda-quality video...

people continuing to spread sterotypes like this are the reason why people don't give sda a chance.

Very this. I see people complaining in streams about how annoying it is to record high quality videos. Even some broadcasters complain about this WHILE STREAMING AT A HIGHER RESOLUTION THAN SDA REQUIRES. It's just blatant laziness, imo. Why spend hundreds of hours trying to complete a speed run only to have it sit in your Twitch highlights which barely work? Uploading to Youtube is just as much work as submitting to SDA.

It IS annoying. Resolution is not an issue most of time, so idk why you brought that up. I tried to produce "SDA quality" video for hours today, only to face with issues with inverted colors. When I did fix it, apparently, the format that I used would render my video unacceptable. To make the matters worse, I tried to run through my recordings through anri-chan and got errors.

Streaming is just filling out few forms of info then click and you're set. To upload on youtube, you just use twitch's internal function- no sweat.

I think that SDA would see a significant increase in submission and activity if you allow standards for submissions to be identical for a stream. Also, given the popularity of streams, I really do not think that your average viewer cares that much about quality. So yeah, stop being neurotic about video quality lol.

[quote="PJ"][quote="Flip"]You don't need a supercomputer to produce sda-quality video...

people continuing to spread sterotypes like this are the reason why people don't give sda a chance.[/quote]

Very this.  I see people complaining in streams about how annoying it is to record high quality videos.  Even some broadcasters complain about this WHILE STREAMING AT A HIGHER RESOLUTION THAN SDA REQUIRES.  It's just blatant laziness, imo.  Why spend hundreds of hours trying to complete a speed run only to have it sit in your Twitch highlights which barely work?  Uploading to Youtube is just as much work as submitting to SDA.[/quote]
It IS annoying. Resolution is not an issue most of time, so idk why you brought that up. I tried to produce "SDA quality" video for hours today, only to face with issues with inverted colors. When I did fix it, apparently, the format that I used would render my video unacceptable. To make the matters worse, I tried to run through my recordings through anri-chan and got errors.

Streaming is just filling out few forms of info then click and you're set. To upload on youtube, you just use twitch's internal function- no sweat.

I think that SDA would see a significant increase in submission and activity if you allow standards for submissions to be identical for a stream. Also, given the popularity of streams, I really do not think that your average viewer cares that much about quality. So yeah, stop being neurotic about video quality lol.

Mystery

2013-02-18 04:29:42 pm

Quote from Orchisawesome:

It IS annoying. Resolution is not an issue most of time, so idk why you brought that up. I tried to produce "SDA quality" video for hours today, only to face with issues with inverted colors. When I did fix it, apparently, the format that I used would render my video unacceptable. To make the matters worse, I tried to run through my recordings through anri-chan and got errors.

You seem to have run into technical issues. They happen everywhere, from streaming to video encoding, to whatever. I don't think SDA's standards are too high. They are pretty lenient and easy to meet. It is likely that you had some bad capture software that screwed up the capture (oh, but there are so many bad programs out there...).

Quote:

Streaming is just filling out few forms of info then click and you're set. To upload on youtube, you just use twitch's internal function- no sweat.

Capturing is just hitting the record button, then throwing it into anri (or perhaps, recently, yua). No sweat.

Quote:

I think that SDA would see a significant increase in submission and activity if you allow standards for submissions to be identical for a stream.

What does this include, exactly? Lower resolution/video quality? Less strict of mistakes?

Quote:

Also, given the popularity of streams, I really do not think that your average viewer cares that much about quality. So yeah, stop being neurotic about video quality lol.

A lot of people do. No one wants to see interlaced video or video that is so blocky you can't see what's happening. No one wants to listen to poor audio.
SDA has video requirements for a reason, and that is because people care.
Streaming is probably a whole different concept, however, where one might be able to get away with lower quality.

[quote="Orchisawesome"]It IS annoying. Resolution is not an issue most of time, so idk why you brought that up. I tried to produce "SDA quality" video for hours today, only to face with issues with inverted colors. When I did fix it, apparently, the format that I used would render my video unacceptable. To make the matters worse, I tried to run through my recordings through anri-chan and got errors. [/quote]
You seem to have run into technical issues. They happen everywhere, from streaming to video encoding, to whatever. I don't think SDA's standards are too high. They are pretty lenient and easy to meet. It is likely that you had some bad capture software that screwed up the capture (oh, but there are so many bad programs out there...).

[quote]Streaming is just filling out few forms of info then click and you're set. To upload on youtube, you just use twitch's internal function- no sweat. [/quote]
Capturing is just hitting the record button, then throwing it into anri (or perhaps, recently, yua). No sweat.

[quote]I think that SDA would see a significant increase in submission and activity if you allow standards for submissions to be identical for a stream.[/quote]
What does this include, exactly? Lower resolution/video quality? Less strict of mistakes?

[quote]Also, given the popularity of streams, I really do not think that your average viewer cares that much about quality. So yeah, stop being neurotic about video quality lol. [/quote]
A lot of people do. No one wants to see interlaced video or video that is so blocky you can't see what's happening. No one wants to listen to poor audio.
SDA has video requirements for a reason, and that is because people care.
Streaming is probably a whole different concept, however, where one might be able to get away with lower quality.

nate

2013-02-18 04:35:53 pm

this is all really valuable feedback. usually in situations like this, fixing the problem is a better idea in the long run than lowering standards, though that is a solution too. it's just that to me it seems to be a software problem at present, and such problems can always be solved with sufficient understanding and patience. (i'm mostly talking about myself here if that's not clear.)

Quote from Paraxade:

Yeah fraps is the biggest problem for me too. After spending a few hundred dollars on my computer I still can't record HD video without serious lag, and I'm not blowing any more money on it anytime soon.

i wonder what the problem is. certainly modern systems have the video and physical i/o necessary to dump the screen to disk 60 times a second, even if it's 1080p. is it the compression? has anyone looked into using the hardware h.264 encoding functionality of modern cpus? maybe using the gpu's functionality wouldn't be appropriate because it's trying to render the game. but i don't know. it's worth looking into too. only other thing i can think of right now is that it's a concurrency issue with access to vram. might be an interesting project anyway. i've written screen capture software before, but it doesn't talk directly to the video hardware (only indirectly through the os), and it uses the cpu to perform interframe deltas and do run-length encoding. so it's meant for doing screencasting, like "look at me use this word processor," not recording games, where i would assume hardware h.264 encoding would be the weapon of choice.

this is all really valuable feedback. usually in situations like this, fixing the problem is a better idea in the long run than lowering standards, though that is a solution too. it's just that to me it seems to be a software problem at present, and such problems can always be solved with sufficient understanding and patience. (i'm mostly talking about myself here if that's not clear.)

[quote="Paraxade"]Yeah fraps is the biggest problem for me too. After spending a few hundred dollars on my computer I still can't record HD video without serious lag, and I'm not blowing any more money on it anytime soon.[/quote]
i wonder what the problem is. certainly modern systems have the video and physical i/o necessary to dump the screen to disk 60 times a second, even if it's 1080p. is it the compression? has anyone looked into using the hardware h.264 encoding functionality of modern cpus? maybe using the gpu's functionality wouldn't be appropriate because it's trying to render the game. but i don't know. it's worth looking into too. only other thing i can think of right now is that it's a concurrency issue with access to vram. might be an interesting project anyway. i've written screen capture software before, but it doesn't talk directly to the video hardware (only indirectly through the os), and it uses the cpu to perform interframe deltas and do run-length encoding. so it's meant for doing screencasting, like "look at me use this word processor," not recording games, where i would assume hardware h.264 encoding would be the weapon of choice.

Paraxade

Edit history:

Paraxade: 2013-02-18 05:06:57 pm

Paraxade: 2013-02-18 05:02:37 pm

Paraxade: 2013-02-18 04:54:32 pm

2013-02-18 04:52:21 pm

Yeah I really don't think we should lower our video quality standards. Making an SDA-quality video is easier for me than starting a stream is. If your source video is fine and you're just having issues with encoding then just send the raw video to nate, he'll take care of the rest for you.

The main thing with SDA becoming irrelevant is in the nature of the site. Even if there was virtually no backlog, frequent updates and the submission process was efficient, it would still take time to go up. This is an issue because with streaming speedrunning has changed into something where there's more emphasis on competition, on streaming, on having the runs NOW. So in the speedrunning community outside SDA... if you want to see the fastest run, or if you want to know who has the record in whatever, or if you want to watch a speedrun? Chances are you won't look at SDA to find any of that information. It's irrelevant in that sense. SDA is very valuable as an archive, but that doesn't matter to anyone who wants to know what's going on -right now-, rather than what happened three or four months ago. And that's getting more and more common as the community expands.

The other thing is that the services SDA provides just aren't in as high demand in the speedrunning community as they used to. SDA's still the place to go for high quality video and the forum and whatever, but a lot of modern runners/viewers don't care as much about video quality as they used to. It also used to be that SDA was the only place you could show off your completed run, but that's not true anymore. I'm fairly sure I have a bigger audience on YouTube now than I get from SDA and I imagine that holds true for any decently popular streamers as well.

I think part of it has to do with the fact that SDA hasn't really changed much, let alone kept up with the times. Like, let's just disregard that the site's overall look and layout hasn't changed since the 90s. More importantly: the site's functionality hasn't changed. SDA still does the same things it did 10 years ago and very little more. You go to SDA to download speedruns, maybe read the runner's comments, and browse the forums. Over the years, the forum software has been updated a couple times, the knowledge base went up, and the video encoding standards changed a couple times. Also, the w00ty page (which is obsoleted by Twitch team pages and isn't even hosted by SDA). That's pretty much it. There was potential for SDA to keep up with current trends in the speedrunning community and expand on what it offered to stay relevant to what the community is right now rather than to what it was 10 years ago, but by this point people have gone elsewhere looking for it.

edit: Another angle is that SDA used to be the only big speedrunning site out there. That's why I bring up that there was potential to expand on what SDA offered - because back then, SDA wasn't just an archive, SDA was the speedrunning site. But now that there's other sites like SRL, SDA has to find its own place within the community rather than being the community, which means we now fill an even smaller niche than we did before.

Yeah I really don't think we should lower our video quality standards. Making an SDA-quality video is easier for me than starting a stream is. If your source video is fine and you're just having issues with encoding then just send the raw video to nate, he'll take care of the rest for you.

The main thing with SDA becoming irrelevant is in the nature of the site. Even if there was virtually no backlog, frequent updates and the submission process was efficient, it would still take time to go up. This is an issue because with streaming speedrunning has changed into something where there's more emphasis on competition, on streaming, on having the runs NOW. So in the speedrunning community outside SDA... if you want to see the fastest run, or if you want to know who has the record in whatever, or if you want to watch a speedrun? Chances are you won't look at SDA to find any of that information. It's irrelevant in that sense. SDA is very valuable as an archive, but that doesn't matter to anyone who wants to know what's going on -right now-, rather than what happened three or four months ago. And that's getting more and more common as the community expands.

The other thing is that the services SDA provides just aren't in as high demand in the speedrunning community as they used to. SDA's still the place to go for high quality video and the forum and whatever, but a lot of modern runners/viewers don't care as much about video quality as they used to. It also used to be that SDA was the only place you could show off your completed run, but that's not true anymore. I'm fairly sure I have a bigger audience on YouTube now than I get from SDA and I imagine that holds true for any decently popular streamers as well.

I think part of it has to do with the fact that SDA hasn't really changed much, let alone kept up with the times. Like, let's just disregard that the site's overall look and layout hasn't changed since the 90s. More importantly: the site's [i]functionality[/i] hasn't changed. SDA still does the same things it did 10 years ago and very little more. You go to SDA to download speedruns, maybe read the runner's comments, and browse the forums. Over the years, the forum software has been updated a couple times, the knowledge base went up, and the video encoding standards changed a couple times. Also, the w00ty page (which is obsoleted by Twitch team pages and isn't even hosted by SDA). That's pretty much it. There was potential for SDA to keep up with current trends in the speedrunning community and expand on what it offered to stay relevant to what the community is right now rather than to what it was 10 years ago, but by this point people have gone elsewhere looking for it.

edit: Another angle is that SDA used to be the only big speedrunning site out there. That's why I bring up that there was potential to expand on what SDA offered - because back then, SDA wasn't just an archive, SDA was [i]the[/i] speedrunning site. But now that there's other sites like SRL, SDA has to find its own place within the community rather than [i]being[/i] the community, which means we now fill an even smaller niche than we did before.

UraniumAnchor

2013-02-18 05:10:58 pm

Not a walrus

Quote from Paraxade:

The other thing is that the services SDA provides just aren't in as high demand in the speedrunning community as they used to. SDA's still the place to go for high quality video and the forum and whatever, but a lot of modern runners/viewers don't care as much about video quality as they used to. It also used to be that SDA was the only place you could show off your completed run, but that's not true anymore. I'm fairly sure I have a bigger audience on YouTube now than I get from SDA and I imagine that holds true for any decently popular streamers as well.

I wouldn't say people started caring less, at least on an individual level. But the inevitable growth of the hobby has led to a lot more people who are perfectly happy just plugging in a Dazzle and jumping on Twitch, since the barrier to entry is a lot lower than it used to be. That doesn't necessarily mean we should lower our standards, though. There are still enough people who do care, otherwise we wouldn't be seeing continued growth. Obviously that doesn't mean we should just sit on our hands, but anybody who accuses us of that is either trolling or hasn't been paying attention.

[quote="Paraxade"]The other thing is that the services SDA provides just aren't in as high demand in the speedrunning community as they used to. SDA's still the place to go for high quality video and the forum and whatever, but a lot of modern runners/viewers don't care as much about video quality as they used to. It also used to be that SDA was the only place you could show off your completed run, but that's not true anymore. I'm fairly sure I have a bigger audience on YouTube now than I get from SDA and I imagine that holds true for any decently popular streamers as well.[/quote]

I wouldn't say people started caring less, at least on an individual level. But the inevitable growth of the hobby has led to a lot more people who are perfectly happy just plugging in a Dazzle and jumping on Twitch, since the barrier to entry is a lot lower than it used to be. That doesn't necessarily mean we should lower our standards, though. There are still enough people who do care, otherwise we wouldn't be seeing continued growth. Obviously that doesn't mean we should just sit on our hands, but anybody who accuses us of that is either trolling or hasn't been paying attention.

Softman25

2013-02-18 05:21:41 pm

I guess I may as well chip in my 2 cents on the matter.

I think the main point here (as has been said by multiple people thus far) is that SDA is not THE site anymore. There are other options, and SDA does not fill its role any differently from before, besides marathons. (Which SDA does bloody fantastically)

The other thing is, it doesn't matter how good of a computer you have or anything like that, it is a hell of a lot harder to make SDA video than to make a twitch highlight and then upload to Youtube from there. To put this into perspective, my Alpha Protocol run was done live at the same time I recorded it. The streamed video was pretty crappy quality, I won't lie about it (my internet sucks therefore my bitrate sucks) but it was there, and it was proof of my time. Furthermore, it was a great run. However, even though I knew exactly what I was doing with Anri, it still took my computer at least 15-20 hours of runtime, over about a week to get the video encoded properly. So essentially, it's taken me a week, to get video which is (technically) already available to me on Twitch's archives. (Although I, like a dumbass, hit "save forever" and Twitch decided not to save it...should have highlighted, whatever...that's not the point!)

But here's the real snag for me. I didn't think the run was going to get verified, but I wanted to submit to SDA anyway. But what about other people? With all due respect (and yes I do know of the improvements going on, and they are amazing...but I'm talking about right now and in the past) the SDA verification is notorious for being just generally slow if you're not running a game that other people play, simply because you need other people to verify it. In my personal experience, I've had a run in the verification process (which still doesn't have enough!) for approx 8 months now. Am I complaining - well not really, it's not like I didn't see it coming. But at the same time, if I knew this would happen, I may have reconsidered doing the run at all. (It was my first submission, so I wasn't as interested in runs/running as I am now)

My point is that you can see how it all goes down. Again, I know about the improvements going on, but the constant breaking of SDA's times don't look good. I know why, but it still doesn't look good. What if I've come to the site for the first time and that's what I saw, really old times for my favorite game. I'd be a little miffed personally. At the same time, I also realise the amount of work that goes into submission, verification and publication...and we come full circle yet again.

I think that once all the SDA improvements roll out, everyone is going to be a lot happier to submit runs, not that there have been a shortage in the past. But I'm talking about those people who are teetering on their decision. I also think that SDA needs to rethink what it is...because right now SDA is just kinda...here and not really doing anything specific that it hasn't done for the past umpteen years.

(Obvious disclaimer: I love SDA and none of the above was an indictment of any kind, again, just putting in my 2 cents!)

I guess I may as well chip in my 2 cents on the matter.

I think the main point here (as has been said by multiple people thus far) is that SDA is not THE site anymore. There are other options, and SDA does not fill its role any differently from before, besides marathons. (Which SDA does bloody fantastically)

The other thing is, it doesn't matter how good of a computer you have or anything like that, it is a hell of a lot harder to make SDA video than to make a twitch highlight and then upload to Youtube from there. To put this into perspective, my Alpha Protocol run was done live at the same time I recorded it. The streamed video was pretty crappy quality, I won't lie about it (my internet sucks therefore my bitrate sucks) but it was there, and it was proof of my time. Furthermore, it was a great run. However, even though I knew [i]exactly[/i] what I was doing with Anri, it still took my computer at least 15-20 hours of runtime, over about a week to get the video encoded properly. So essentially, it's taken me a week, to get video which is (technically) already available to me on Twitch's archives. (Although I, like a dumbass, hit "save forever" and Twitch decided not to save it...should have highlighted, whatever...that's not the point!)

But here's the real snag for me. I didn't think the run was going to get verified, but I wanted to submit to SDA anyway. But what about other people? With all due respect (and yes I do know of the improvements going on, and they are amazing...but I'm talking about right now and in the past) the SDA verification is notorious for being just generally slow if you're not running a game that other people play, simply because you need other people to verify it. In my personal experience, I've had a run in the verification process (which still doesn't have enough!) for approx 8 months now. Am I complaining - well not really, it's not like I didn't see it coming. But at the same time, if I knew this would happen, I may have reconsidered doing the run at all. (It was my first submission, so I wasn't as interested in runs/running as I am now)

My point is that you can see how it all goes down. Again, I know about the improvements going on, but the constant breaking of SDA's times don't look good. I know why, but it still doesn't look good. What if I've come to the site for the first time and that's what I saw, really old times for my favorite game. I'd be a little miffed personally. At the same time, I also realise the amount of work that goes into submission, verification and publication...and we come full circle yet again.

I think that once all the SDA improvements roll out, everyone is going to be a lot happier to submit runs, not that there have been a shortage in the past. But I'm talking about those people who are teetering on their decision. I also think that SDA needs to rethink what it is...because right now SDA is just kinda...here and not really doing anything specific that it hasn't done for the past umpteen years.

[i](Obvious disclaimer: I love SDA and none of the above was an indictment of any kind, again, just putting in my 2 cents!)[/i]

nate

2013-02-18 05:29:16 pm

i think as the year goes on and more stuff gets automated it would be cool to bring back the public queue status page. could add some additional stats like mean/median time in verification. with everything automated we would be immune from people's hands on our shoulders like "hey, you aren't working fast enough for my taste" and it would represent the facts about verification better than sda staff saying "it's not as bad as people say" or whatever. basically overdue verifications are an endangered species and this is one way i thought of to communicate that.

Flip

Edit history:

Flip: 2013-02-18 05:37:03 pm

2013-02-18 05:31:17 pm

1-Up!

Just want to add on to what nate said by saying that very soon we'll have a system in place to help runs that aren't popular enough to get verifiers.

Also I want to point out that, contrary to what people are saying or may think, we aren't dying. Submissions have been climbing for a year and are constantly at an all-time high. We're making all kinds of moves to shorten the submission process and generally streamline the way the site works. Also we're doing our best to implement the requests made in the Roundtable thread.

Heidrage

2013-02-18 05:36:26 pm

Willing to teach you the impossible

Quote from Flip:

Just want to add on to what nate said by saying that very soon we'll have a system in place to help runs that aren't popular enough to get verifiers.

♥

UraniumAnchor

Edit history:

UraniumAnchor: 2013-02-18 05:42:35 pm

2013-02-18 05:42:19 pm

Not a walrus

Instead of saying "SDA's times constantly getting broken looks bad", it's probably better to look at why people aren't sending the new times in. The two big ones that spring to mind:

1) The lag time between submission and posting. Nobody likes this, least of all the staff. The old system before I started on the new queue was not designed for anywhere near the current flow of runs that we've gotten in the last year. It's already way easier than it was before to manage this sort of thing, but unfortunately the next big hurdle is basically not going to help until almost every piece in place. If you say SDA 2.0 I am going to light you on fire.
2) Video encoding requirements. They're strict, yes, but I think a lot of people have misconceptions about exactly what constitutes an appropriate submission. Format isn't super important, it's more about proper deinterlacing for older material, and not dropping too many frames or screwing up the audio. Unless you've got a codec from the moon, nate can probably mold it into something usable. Nate's free to correct me on this, of course, but I've seen some pretty weird videos coming through the queue that made it out the other end just fine.

Instead of saying "SDA's times constantly getting broken looks bad", it's probably better to look at why people aren't sending the new times in. The two big ones that spring to mind:

1) The lag time between submission and posting. Nobody likes this, least of all the staff. The old system before I started on the new queue was not designed for anywhere near the current flow of runs that we've gotten in the last year. It's already way easier than it was before to manage this sort of thing, but unfortunately the next big hurdle is basically not going to help until almost every piece in place. [size=1]If you say SDA 2.0 I am going to light you on fire.[/size]
2) Video encoding requirements. They're strict, yes, but I think a lot of people have misconceptions about exactly what constitutes an appropriate submission. Format isn't super important, it's more about proper deinterlacing for older material, and not dropping too many frames or screwing up the audio. Unless you've got a codec from the moon, nate can probably mold it into something usable. Nate's free to correct me on this, of course, but I've seen some pretty weird videos coming through the queue that made it out the other end just fine.

Paraxade

2013-02-18 06:23:23 pm

Of course getting people to submit more is a good idea, but it might also be worth exploring ways we can display more current information without loosening our verification standards.

Heidrage

Edit history:

Heidrage: 2013-02-18 06:30:54 pm

2013-02-18 06:29:29 pm

Willing to teach you the impossible

I can contest to what UA said. I had a a run just recently go threw that I could not encode proper. I sent him the 2.78 GB file and he made it work. I showed him what I did and showed him the log files. He said I did nothing wrong but he would take care of it for me. And this was a progressive source, not interlace. nate is a BAMF and really needs WAY more credit than what he gets from the every day sda user.

But really, all submissions are just required to be recorded properly. Encoding and such can all be done by SDA. If you are having issues with it, dont worry about it. It is not your issue if you want to submit. If you recorded it proper, it is SDA's issue to create the final product if you dont feel up to par about it.

Edit: Correction, he recovered 2 of my runs from shit recordings. I still remember my first Super C submission. Something was wrong with the original recording resolution, but he worked his magic.

MortyreR45

(user is banned)

2013-02-18 06:31:12 pm

I AM FUCKED ANGRY

Paraxa ->
When you need informations for a game than play the game ! Or it make not sense. I hate it to read all the spoil in the verify topic, because of unknown verify people.

Submit more runs is harder from year to year, because we must improve. And Fraps is easy, learning is the key.

currently is all ok with sda.

tenfoLd

2013-02-18 06:32:22 pm

I agree with what's been said above. I'm sure it's been stated before, but if sda were to:

A. Streamline the submission process ( without lowering standards) to encourage more submissions and to present a more up to date library of verified, quality runs.
B. Perhaps create a Text only leaderboard system that would display the most up to date times with the disclaimer that they are not verified and do not have available video at the moment

I think most people would be happy Smiley

regardless of the direction sda takes, I will be an sda loyalist to the end

UraniumAnchor

2013-02-18 06:55:23 pm

Not a walrus

Quote from Paraxade:

Of course getting people to submit more is a good idea, but it might also be worth exploring ways we can display more current information without loosening our verification standards.

Depends on what you mean by 'current information', but making the entire site more dynamic in general is definitely something we've got plans for.