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Should we have game endings? (They are a major spoiler, really.) If so, should they be static images (as in vgmuseum.com) or video (we lack nice video recording in Meka...)? Is YouTube quality acceptable (in terms of compression artefacts)?

Incidentally, I uploaded some endings on Youtube, this being the latest one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ19n421nBc, you can judge the quality from this...
I wouldn't mind to upload more videos if requested.

edit: also this, but it's an older video, so I'd have to redo it if you want it for official use: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAxz_vH1eLU

Youtube is putting out 1080p HD video these days. See for example (click 1080p in the bottom right corner):

The only issue being the quality of the uploaded video.

Here's a test of different sizes:

http://wip2.smspower.org/Site/SandBox

It might be possible to use a custom player that allows pixel resizing (while stealing YouTube's bandwidth).

1080p is not much use for 248x192 SMS and 160x144 GG videos. More to the point is whether the served video is at the original resolution; YouTube is serving Tom's videos as 320x288 FLV1 and 408x368 H264. Scaling back to the original resolution results in blurriness.

But youtube doesn't upscale videos, it just adds black bars. Any blurring is caused by you trying to squish or stretch the youtube player out of its original size.

I have to admit that I upscaled that video of the bad ending by 2x because many people insisted that by doing so the resulting quality would be better. Even if I sure it was wrong (99.99% of my other videos are in native resolution (e.g. 320x224 for Genesis videos)) I wanted to give it a try anyway, resulting in a 320x288 video instead of 160x144. And, as I expected, the resulting quality wasn't different at all, so after this one-time experiment I'll go back to natural 1x videos. And I'll keep on laughing of people who upload 1080p videos of 8-bit and 16-bit games.
Btw Maxim, the mp4 "HQ" version always exists, it's just that it's not directly available for videos whose Y resolution is too low. To see it you just have to add &fmt=18 at the end of any video's URL. For example, this is the mp4 version of a 160x144 video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiVmtSEcElA&fmt=18 (WARNING: it's a video of a game boy game).

edit: I almost forgot to say, if we decide to host videos on youtube, I'm up and available to encode and upload them, in native resolution and with the best quality possible, on smspower's channel (there is one iirc).

We have an smspower account but I don't know if Youtube will be happy if we give out the password. In general, we might prefer to have the original lossless videos stored safely somewhere so we can re-upload if they are lost.

Tom, if you want to take on this task (although I am not expecting endings for every game!) then I would be happy to work on integrating it into the site.

Due to the spoiler nature, it'll probably be a text link from the game page to a page hosting a Youtube video and/or screenshots. We already have credits in screengrabbed (and often edited) form, so there may be a bit of overlap.

For what I know, Youtube doesn't seem to mind at all about accounts shared by more people (I uploaded gameplay videos on some friends' channels in their behalf several times in the past), but I can see your point and why raw videos should be stored somewhere for future reference.
I see you mention "lossless" videos. Well, for one I will outright say that I agree with you, as I always try to upload videos on Youtube as uncompressed as I can, in order to reduce the quality loss caused by their transcoding. While RAW uncompressed video might be overkill (also because Youtube doesn't seem to like RAW videos), I found out that the TSCC (Techsmith Screen Capture Codec) codec works definitely well for this purpose; WAV audio is supported instead, and I have to say that the end audio quality is much better if the source video uses wav audio instead of mp3, ogg, or other lossy formats. For this reason, my current "standard quality" for youtube uploads is TSCC with WAV audio (when possible; H264 at extremely high bitrate with WAV audio if > 2 GB).
Also yes, the lack of a SMS/GG emulator with a solid direct video dumper forces me to use a screen capturer, Camtasia Studio, so the framerate might fluctuate a bit. Sure, there is degavi, but its output quality is more than questionable (short version: it basically sucks), unlike other emulators' with built-in AVI dump capabilities such as the TAS versions of Gens, VBA, FBA, and many others.
So yeah, this is what I can offer :)
I will upload something on archive.org later today, maybe Sonic 2's ending itself since I already have a few savestates handy.

Google Video supported ZMVB but Youtube didn't last time I tried - they're all ffmpeg or mencoder underneath, I think, so these things ought to appear eventually.

Youtube claim they'll copy over the audio stream if it meets certain conditions, but I haven't experimented.

There is a lossless flavour of H.264 but it always seemed to produce huge videos for me.

Did you try Kega's video dumper? It's a custom lossless codec that you can presumably transcode from, and Steve seems to usually do things reasonably well.

I have a bunch of savestates thanks to my recent credits blitz that may be useful, and zophar.net has a lot of ending savestates. I'll have a look through this weekend.

Is archive.org a better option than Youtube?

I can't say archive.org is better than Youtube, but it always keeps a copy of the original file available to be downloaded, alongside two or three transcoded versions and a streaming version which can be embedded everywhere. So I thought to upload the videos on there so you can grab them and reupload them on youtube, or something.
Another good feature of archive.org is that they're not limited to 10 minutes and 59 seconds.

Re: Kega fusion, I have to admit I never tried its video dumper, mainly because I use either plain Gens or Gens rerecording for my Genesis videos, as I'm against proprietary video codecs. I might check it out, but I don't expect much, considering that Kega tends to stretch SMS/GG pictures, unless there is an option for that somewhere. To be honest I'm not a fan of Kega, I use it only when I have to dump vgm files, but that's it. Otherwise I wouldn't even keep it on my hard drives.

I'll look into that, either later today or tomorrow.

I actually prefer the archive.org player, it's less obnoxious than YouTube's. I've added support for it to the site, maybe we'll just go with that. Any idea what codecs they support?

I think they support most of the major current codecs such as H264, though now that I think about that I'm not sure if they support TSCC at all, I'll have to investigate that. And I've yet to look into Kega's avi features. Today it was a bad day, I'm sorry :(

However, if the raw movies are intended to be available for download, we shouldn't use a specific codec such as TSCC or Kega's, as many people wouldn't be able to watch them. So H264 with an exagerate bitrate might be the best option.

The original files would be more for re-uploading or re-encoding rather than downloads, as we would be relying on third party hosts. Wacky codecs are fine with me so long as they're supported reasonably, i.e. something in ffmpeg/mplayer/vlc. As I mentioned, there is a lossless flavour of H.264 but it does eat a lot of bits.

Kega does seem incapable of logging unfiltered video :( and Meka's screen/audio recording gets out of sync unless you manage to stay perfectly on 60fps.

As I feared, Kega's recording tool always stretches the videos to 640x480, making them definitely ugly. So I'm stuck with Dega and Camtasia Studio's screen capturer, which doesn't work that bad anyway, it's not hard to keep a solid 60fps on a 160x144 or 248x192 screen.

That said, I uploaded a test video of GG Sonic 2's Good Ending on archive.org, with TSCC video and WAV audio, to see if archive.org supported the TSCC codec, and I'm sad to say that it doesn't.

So I reuploaded it with H264 video and WAV audio; the H264 video is at the highest possible bitrate (though most of the filesize is still occupied by the audio track). There are *some* compression artifacts in the raw file already, so if anyone can suggest me a lossless codec more common than TSCC, please be my guest. Otherwise I think it's acceptable as it is.

Now, I actually wrote this post ~1 hour ago, but I didn't want to post it because archive.org suddenly decided to kick me back in the process queue (maybe because I uploaded two files in a row) and it has yet to transcode my second file. But since Maxim replied, I thought I could post this as well.
So what now? Well, the raw video file is on archive.org and it can be downloaded, but since it's not been transcoded yet, it can't be streamed. The details page is here: http://www.archive.org/details/smspower.
I gave it the generic "smspower" name, which is now tied to my account; I won't mind to give the login details to Maxim of course.

Hopefully they'll transcode my video soon so we can see the resulting quality; in the mean time, Maxim, you can try to upload it on Youtube if you want. The filename of the raw video is "Sonic2_GG_GoodEnding.mkv"; once the transcoding process is complete you'll see more files on that page, along with the player.
Again, that file is currently a H264+WAV combination; I won't mind to reupload the first one (which was TSCC+WAV) if you just want to put it on Youtube.

edit: woo, the transcoding process began. The raw file is obviously the 20MB one listed under "Matroska". The streaming video should be available soon.
edit2: the streaming version is up.

HuffYUV is probably the best-supported lossless codec, but is not particularly high-compression. You might get away with MSRLE, although I think that also involves reducing the video to a paletted image.

Dega has a lousy PSG emulator, by the way, unless that got fixed in one of the forks.

Edit: Aargh, MKV is annoying (vanilla VirtualDub doesn't support it) and I've had no luck converting it to AVI. Can you post/send a lossless AVI for me to play with?

I tried the HuffYUV codec, but unless I was doing it wrong, it resulted in a 120+ MB file, which is just too much, imo.

I usually prefer MKV to AVI nowadays, because the files are a lot smaller and it allows for more codecs (e.g. ogg audio) which are unsupported in the AVI container. However I'm uploading an AVI on a private location (read: a server I *shouldn't* use) just for you.

I had a play with all the lossless codecs I have around on the video you sent and "H.264 lossless" in ffdshow has the advantage of being almost the smallest (a little smaller than TSCC), very widely supported (it's H.264) and free.

Unfortunately, Youtube managed to totally screw it up by decoding it wrongly (apparently one can tell which version of mencoder they use from the way it's wrong). So I'm back where I started really...

(MKV is great, but there's too much software that doesn't support it. AVI is probably the most widely supported container right now.)

I've put a quick test here:

http://wip2.smspower.org/Games/SonicTheHedgehog2-GG

The endings are linked based on the headings on the ending(s) page.

Some observations:

- The archive.org mp4 has terrible audio and pretty bad video, no "preview image" and is 12MB. Also, it seems a bit squashed.
- The good ending (uploaded at 1x scale) has some artefacts, and is 5.5MB. The Youtube player seems to maintain the pixel aspect ratio properly.
- The bad ending (uploaded at 2x scale) seems to have less artefacts, and is 11MB

So it looks like uploading 2x scaled video makes Youtube give it ~2x the bitrate which overall looks better.

I will have a go later at using a third-party player for the Youtube stuff to see if I can get some unsmoothed pixels.

May seem overkill, but wouldn't a Java or Silverlight based emulator customized with savestate do the job decently?

Maxim wrote

So it looks like uploading 2x scaled video makes Youtube give it ~2x the bitrate which overall looks better.

Ha, so in the end this turns out to be true, after all... Even if I always thought it wasn't the case... I'm glad that the "one-time experiment" I did with the 2x bad ending was useful to perform this comparison :)

Bock wrote

May seem overkill, but wouldn't a Java or Silverlight based emulator customized with savestate do the job decently?

Well, it would, but I expect most people would find that annoying. Personally, I disable Java in-browser and do not install Silverlight. Embedded Flash video has the advantage that most people are happy to use it, even if it is bandwidth-intensive.

Another test...

4x scale:
2x scale:
1x scale:

All are being encoded at varying resolutions, and the non-native ones are all coming out as bigger, but getting YouTube to select the best one is tough.

Right so, since I saw your new update about videos, I was wondering if an official video format for game endings was chosen.

I think the official format is "whatever", and YouTube.

Alright, I'll get things rolling later today (or, more likely, tomorrow), with 2x scaled videos, on my Youtube channel. Youtube will transcode them to H264 or something, but I'll keep the lossless versions (in the TSCC format) on my hard drive for a while.

As I said once, I'm not a fan of upscaled videos, but some research revealed that H264 doesn't work so well with pixel art for whatever reason, so by making them 2x bigger they should look a lot better when viewed on Youtube.

Youtube has two main SD resolution: (up to) 360p and (up to) 480p. This means that a 320x288 pixels GG video would look fine in any of Youtube's players, but a 512x384 pixels SMS video would look "as is" in the 480p player, but would be resized to 480x360 in the 360p player. Unfortunately this can't be avoided, but the 480p mode can be enforced by manually adding &fmt=18 to Youtube's URL.

My research suggests that:

- "Lossless" H.264 does great on pixel art (better than TSCC), but it's deprecated.
- YouTube is not intelligent enough to discard lower-quality streams when their bitrate is actually higher than the high-quality stream
- There's no easy way to guess which fmt parameter gets you the good-quality lossless stream
- There's no easy way to specify pixel scaling of the video
- There's no easy way to guess the player size to get integer scaling of pixels (without which pixel scaling would look awful)

...so I'm left with the conclusion that the best option is just to link to YouTube videos in the default way and people can click through/use GreaseMonkey scripts/whatever if they don't like the defaults.

Have a Slider (GG) ending :)

I've added it (linked from http://www.smspower.org/Games/Slider-GG )

Author	Message
Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14744 Location: London	Game endings? Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 10:56 am
	Should we have game endings? (They are a major spoiler, really.) If so, should they be static images (as in vgmuseum.com) or video (we lack nice video recording in Meka...)? Is YouTube quality acceptable (in terms of compression artefacts)?

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 11:14 am
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	Incidentally, I uploaded some endings on Youtube, this being the latest one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ19n421nBc, you can judge the quality from this... I wouldn't mind to upload more videos if requested. edit: also this, but it's an older video, so I'd have to redo it if you want it for official use: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAxz_vH1eLU

Imhotep Joined: 13 Feb 2010 Posts: 5	Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 3:03 pm
Imhotep Joined: 13 Feb 2010 Posts: 5	Youtube is putting out 1080p HD video these days. See for example (click 1080p in the bottom right corner): The only issue being the quality of the uploaded video.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14744 Location: London	Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 3:17 pm
	Here's a test of different sizes: http://wip2.smspower.org/Site/SandBox It might be possible to use a custom player that allows pixel resizing (while stealing YouTube's bandwidth).

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14744 Location: London	Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 5:44 pm
	1080p is not much use for 248x192 SMS and 160x144 GG videos. More to the point is whether the served video is at the original resolution; YouTube is serving Tom's videos as 320x288 FLV1 and 408x368 H264. Scaling back to the original resolution results in blurriness.

Imhotep Joined: 13 Feb 2010 Posts: 5	Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 6:18 pm
Imhotep Joined: 13 Feb 2010 Posts: 5	But youtube doesn't upscale videos, it just adds black bars. Any blurring is caused by you trying to squish or stretch the youtube player out of its original size.

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2010 6:39 pm
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	I have to admit that I upscaled that video of the bad ending by 2x because many people insisted that by doing so the resulting quality would be better. Even if I sure it was wrong (99.99% of my other videos are in native resolution (e.g. 320x224 for Genesis videos)) I wanted to give it a try anyway, resulting in a 320x288 video instead of 160x144. And, as I expected, the resulting quality wasn't different at all, so after this one-time experiment I'll go back to natural 1x videos. And I'll keep on laughing of people who upload 1080p videos of 8-bit and 16-bit games. Btw Maxim, the mp4 "HQ" version always exists, it's just that it's not directly available for videos whose Y resolution is too low. To see it you just have to add &fmt=18 at the end of any video's URL. For example, this is the mp4 version of a 160x144 video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiVmtSEcElA&fmt=18 (WARNING: it's a video of a game boy game). edit: I almost forgot to say, if we decide to host videos on youtube, I'm up and available to encode and upload them, in native resolution and with the best quality possible, on smspower's channel (there is one iirc).

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14744 Location: London	Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 11:01 am
	We have an smspower account but I don't know if Youtube will be happy if we give out the password. In general, we might prefer to have the original lossless videos stored safely somewhere so we can re-upload if they are lost. Tom, if you want to take on this task (although I am not expecting endings for every game!) then I would be happy to work on integrating it into the site. Due to the spoiler nature, it'll probably be a text link from the game page to a page hosting a Youtube video and/or screenshots. We already have credits in screengrabbed (and often edited) form, so there may be a bit of overlap.

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 1:05 pm
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	For what I know, Youtube doesn't seem to mind at all about accounts shared by more people (I uploaded gameplay videos on some friends' channels in their behalf several times in the past), but I can see your point and why raw videos should be stored somewhere for future reference. I see you mention "lossless" videos. Well, for one I will outright say that I agree with you, as I always try to upload videos on Youtube as uncompressed as I can, in order to reduce the quality loss caused by their transcoding. While RAW uncompressed video might be overkill (also because Youtube doesn't seem to like RAW videos), I found out that the TSCC (Techsmith Screen Capture Codec) codec works definitely well for this purpose; WAV audio is supported instead, and I have to say that the end audio quality is much better if the source video uses wav audio instead of mp3, ogg, or other lossy formats. For this reason, my current "standard quality" for youtube uploads is TSCC with WAV audio (when possible; H264 at extremely high bitrate with WAV audio if > 2 GB). Also yes, the lack of a SMS/GG emulator with a solid direct video dumper forces me to use a screen capturer, Camtasia Studio, so the framerate might fluctuate a bit. Sure, there is degavi, but its output quality is more than questionable (short version: it basically sucks), unlike other emulators' with built-in AVI dump capabilities such as the TAS versions of Gens, VBA, FBA, and many others. So yeah, this is what I can offer :) I will upload something on archive.org later today, maybe Sonic 2's ending itself since I already have a few savestates handy.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14744 Location: London	Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 2:30 pm
	Google Video supported ZMVB but Youtube didn't last time I tried - they're all ffmpeg or mencoder underneath, I think, so these things ought to appear eventually. Youtube claim they'll copy over the audio stream if it meets certain conditions, but I haven't experimented. There is a lossless flavour of H.264 but it always seemed to produce huge videos for me. Did you try Kega's video dumper? It's a custom lossless codec that you can presumably transcode from, and Steve seems to usually do things reasonably well. I have a bunch of savestates thanks to my recent credits blitz that may be useful, and zophar.net has a lot of ending savestates. I'll have a look through this weekend. Is archive.org a better option than Youtube?

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 3:56 pm
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	I can't say archive.org is better than Youtube, but it always keeps a copy of the original file available to be downloaded, alongside two or three transcoded versions and a streaming version which can be embedded everywhere. So I thought to upload the videos on there so you can grab them and reupload them on youtube, or something. Another good feature of archive.org is that they're not limited to 10 minutes and 59 seconds. Re: Kega fusion, I have to admit I never tried its video dumper, mainly because I use either plain Gens or Gens rerecording for my Genesis videos, as I'm against proprietary video codecs. I might check it out, but I don't expect much, considering that Kega tends to stretch SMS/GG pictures, unless there is an option for that somewhere. To be honest I'm not a fan of Kega, I use it only when I have to dump vgm files, but that's it. Otherwise I wouldn't even keep it on my hard drives. I'll look into that, either later today or tomorrow.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14744 Location: London	Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 7:43 pm
	I actually prefer the archive.org player, it's less obnoxious than YouTube's. I've added support for it to the site, maybe we'll just go with that. Any idea what codecs they support?

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 8:34 pm
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	I think they support most of the major current codecs such as H264, though now that I think about that I'm not sure if they support TSCC at all, I'll have to investigate that. And I've yet to look into Kega's avi features. Today it was a bad day, I'm sorry :( However, if the raw movies are intended to be available for download, we shouldn't use a specific codec such as TSCC or Kega's, as many people wouldn't be able to watch them. So H264 with an exagerate bitrate might be the best option.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14744 Location: London	Posted: Fri Feb 19, 2010 12:40 am
	The original files would be more for re-uploading or re-encoding rather than downloads, as we would be relying on third party hosts. Wacky codecs are fine with me so long as they're supported reasonably, i.e. something in ffmpeg/mplayer/vlc. As I mentioned, there is a lossless flavour of H.264 but it does eat a lot of bits. Kega does seem incapable of logging unfiltered video :( and Meka's screen/audio recording gets out of sync unless you manage to stay perfectly on 60fps.

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	Posted: Fri Feb 19, 2010 1:40 am
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	As I feared, Kega's recording tool always stretches the videos to 640x480, making them definitely ugly. So I'm stuck with Dega and Camtasia Studio's screen capturer, which doesn't work that bad anyway, it's not hard to keep a solid 60fps on a 160x144 or 248x192 screen. That said, I uploaded a test video of GG Sonic 2's Good Ending on archive.org, with TSCC video and WAV audio, to see if archive.org supported the TSCC codec, and I'm sad to say that it doesn't. So I reuploaded it with H264 video and WAV audio; the H264 video is at the highest possible bitrate (though most of the filesize is still occupied by the audio track). There are some compression artifacts in the raw file already, so if anyone can suggest me a lossless codec more common than TSCC, please be my guest. Otherwise I think it's acceptable as it is. Now, I actually wrote this post ~1 hour ago, but I didn't want to post it because archive.org suddenly decided to kick me back in the process queue (maybe because I uploaded two files in a row) and it has yet to transcode my second file. But since Maxim replied, I thought I could post this as well. So what now? Well, the raw video file is on archive.org and it can be downloaded, but since it's not been transcoded yet, it can't be streamed. The details page is here: http://www.archive.org/details/smspower. I gave it the generic "smspower" name, which is now tied to my account; I won't mind to give the login details to Maxim of course. Hopefully they'll transcode my video soon so we can see the resulting quality; in the mean time, Maxim, you can try to upload it on Youtube if you want. The filename of the raw video is "Sonic2_GG_GoodEnding.mkv"; once the transcoding process is complete you'll see more files on that page, along with the player. Again, that file is currently a H264+WAV combination; I won't mind to reupload the first one (which was TSCC+WAV) if you just want to put it on Youtube. edit: woo, the transcoding process began. The raw file is obviously the 20MB one listed under "Matroska". The streaming video should be available soon. edit2: the streaming version is up.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14744 Location: London	Posted: Fri Feb 19, 2010 2:38 am
	HuffYUV is probably the best-supported lossless codec, but is not particularly high-compression. You might get away with MSRLE, although I think that also involves reducing the video to a paletted image. Dega has a lousy PSG emulator, by the way, unless that got fixed in one of the forks. Edit: Aargh, MKV is annoying (vanilla VirtualDub doesn't support it) and I've had no luck converting it to AVI. Can you post/send a lossless AVI for me to play with?

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	Posted: Fri Feb 19, 2010 5:13 pm
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	I tried the HuffYUV codec, but unless I was doing it wrong, it resulted in a 120+ MB file, which is just too much, imo. I usually prefer MKV to AVI nowadays, because the files are a lot smaller and it allows for more codecs (e.g. ogg audio) which are unsupported in the AVI container. However I'm uploading an AVI on a private location (read: a server I shouldn't use) just for you.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14744 Location: London	Posted: Sat Feb 20, 2010 12:27 am
	I had a play with all the lossless codecs I have around on the video you sent and "H.264 lossless" in ffdshow has the advantage of being almost the smallest (a little smaller than TSCC), very widely supported (it's H.264) and free. Unfortunately, Youtube managed to totally screw it up by decoding it wrongly (apparently one can tell which version of mencoder they use from the way it's wrong). So I'm back where I started really... (MKV is great, but there's too much software that doesn't support it. AVI is probably the most widely supported container right now.)

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14744 Location: London	Posted: Sat Feb 20, 2010 2:26 am
	I've put a quick test here: http://wip2.smspower.org/Games/SonicTheHedgehog2-GG The endings are linked based on the headings on the ending(s) page. Some observations: - The archive.org mp4 has terrible audio and pretty bad video, no "preview image" and is 12MB. Also, it seems a bit squashed. - The good ending (uploaded at 1x scale) has some artefacts, and is 5.5MB. The Youtube player seems to maintain the pixel aspect ratio properly. - The bad ending (uploaded at 2x scale) seems to have less artefacts, and is 11MB So it looks like uploading 2x scaled video makes Youtube give it ~2x the bitrate which overall looks better. I will have a go later at using a third-party player for the Youtube stuff to see if I can get some unsmoothed pixels.

Bock Site Admin Joined: 08 Jul 2001 Posts: 8651 Location: Paris, France	Posted: Sat Feb 20, 2010 2:55 am
	May seem overkill, but wouldn't a Java or Silverlight based emulator customized with savestate do the job decently?

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	Posted: Sat Feb 20, 2010 4:10 am
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	Maxim wrote So it looks like uploading 2x scaled video makes Youtube give it ~2x the bitrate which overall looks better. Ha, so in the end this turns out to be true, after all... Even if I always thought it wasn't the case... I'm glad that the "one-time experiment" I did with the 2x bad ending was useful to perform this comparison :)

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14744 Location: London	Posted: Sat Feb 20, 2010 12:40 pm
	Bock wrote May seem overkill, but wouldn't a Java or Silverlight based emulator customized with savestate do the job decently? Well, it would, but I expect most people would find that annoying. Personally, I disable Java in-browser and do not install Silverlight. Embedded Flash video has the advantage that most people are happy to use it, even if it is bandwidth-intensive.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14744 Location: London	Posted: Sat Feb 20, 2010 4:37 pm
	Another test... 4x scale: 2x scale: 1x scale: All are being encoded at varying resolutions, and the non-native ones are all coming out as bigger, but getting YouTube to select the best one is tough.

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	Posted: Fri Jun 04, 2010 2:22 am
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	Right so, since I saw your new update about videos, I was wondering if an official video format for game endings was chosen.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14744 Location: London	Posted: Fri Jun 04, 2010 8:23 am
	I think the official format is "whatever", and YouTube.

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	Posted: Fri Jun 04, 2010 9:31 am
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	Alright, I'll get things rolling later today (or, more likely, tomorrow), with 2x scaled videos, on my Youtube channel. Youtube will transcode them to H264 or something, but I'll keep the lossless versions (in the TSCC format) on my hard drive for a while. As I said once, I'm not a fan of upscaled videos, but some research revealed that H264 doesn't work so well with pixel art for whatever reason, so by making them 2x bigger they should look a lot better when viewed on Youtube. Youtube has two main SD resolution: (up to) 360p and (up to) 480p. This means that a 320x288 pixels GG video would look fine in any of Youtube's players, but a 512x384 pixels SMS video would look "as is" in the 480p player, but would be resized to 480x360 in the 360p player. Unfortunately this can't be avoided, but the 480p mode can be enforced by manually adding &fmt=18 to Youtube's URL.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14744 Location: London	Posted: Fri Jun 04, 2010 9:45 am
	My research suggests that: - "Lossless" H.264 does great on pixel art (better than TSCC), but it's deprecated. - YouTube is not intelligent enough to discard lower-quality streams when their bitrate is actually higher than the high-quality stream - There's no easy way to guess which fmt parameter gets you the good-quality lossless stream - There's no easy way to specify pixel scaling of the video - There's no easy way to guess the player size to get integer scaling of pixels (without which pixel scaling would look awful) ...so I'm left with the conclusion that the best option is just to link to YouTube videos in the default way and people can click through/use GreaseMonkey scripts/whatever if they don't like the defaults.

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	Posted: Thu Jun 10, 2010 6:35 pm
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1356 Location: italy	Have a Slider (GG) ending :)

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14744 Location: London	Posted: Thu Jun 10, 2010 7:34 pm
	I've added it (linked from http://www.smspower.org/Games/Slider-GG )

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