Replay Talk: Distribution, HD, Live Streaming, Captures,etc.

[DJ Incompetent]

Combo question thread. This is sorta the sequel to GaijinPunch's replay capture thread from like 3 years ago.

Here's links to other replay resources:
Replay capture from supergun
General Replay Capture
Gaijin Punch's replay capture thread
Sigma superguns
Pull audio from video
Capturing from computer
Video Capture Devices
KET Live stream

So I got my shit together and got another superplay in the can. However a lot of shit has changed over that past year with HD captures and availability, higher upload capacities on youtube, etc.

I'm starting to feel like I need to update my setup to raise the quality of my captures whenever possible. Basically to capture HD games in widescreen HD and raise the overall quality of 4:3 SD captures.
The first question is should I? If so, what is recommended for HD or higher end replay captures, primarily directly from console, but emulator recommendations are ok. What are all the cool kids using nowadays?



The second big question is replay distribution.
For standard downloads, super-play is still the good place to upload to as far as I know. I'm not good enough to deserve my own website or anything, so I'm probably just gonna stay the course. I used to do the Xvid 2-pass encoding method Icarus showed me, but switched to mp4s because for a small increase in overall file size, it takes about 1/5 the time to encode the final product. If anybody suggests different codecs or if a hot new file format came out, I'd like to know about it. Has a newer encoding method come out that compresses to an even lower lossless file size than Xvid and MP4?

As for streaming replays. YouTube has been dropping off since NicoNico came about and ContentID system started fucking up everything else up. Yet, they're accepting 1GB uploads now. Mind you, my style of replays are somewhat unique to the scene with the copyrighted music so about 1/5 of my youtube replay segments have been pulled now and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna be handed the account ban soon. Should I change places to put up streamed replays? Should I be fumbling my way through NicoNico uploading or is there a new hotness English site I should move my shop to? What are the A-level players doing besides Nico?



The other question, live streaming. I always wanted to perform a false start reel on a streaming broadcast or other wacky shit, but uStream and Mogulus run on like, flash 10 and from what I've tried, it will only accept input from webcams and not capture devices. I'm using a Dazzle Capture Dongle (140?) that just inputs composite, S-Video, and RCA right/left channel sound and outputs by USB. Am I doing it wrong or is there another model of direct input I should be looking into? What about the players who broadcast already like KET? Are they showing direct input or are they just pointing a webcam at their monitor/screen?


Thanks for your assistance.

[Smraedis]

I spent a while trying to find these topics once again, as I am going to be making more replays.

I think replays should be put on youtube for easy access, and then have high quality files on super-play. I think 300-500MB is around the best size for a 20-30 replay, as you could keep quite a lot on a computer.


I was also thinking about improving the quality of my videos, but it would cost me too much to make any significant improvements. Also the computer I usually record with, is falling apart, which is making things a lot harder here

[Twiddle]

My not-very-often-updated kusoplay site (click web link in my profile) tries to go for low file sizes (512kbps or 640kbps) while retaining the visibility of every single object, which isn't always possible in Youtube. However, I'd prefer superplays to use better quality (If I ever do a new one, it'd be 848x480 or 480x640 at 1.5mbps.)

Also, I'm not very keen on the idea of keeping gigs of superplays on my hard drive, so I'd prefer streaming.

[Ghegs]

I'm not good enough to deserve my own website or anything

Hey, that didn't stop me from putting up my own site for my crummy runs. I don't think you need to be "good enough" for your own website, it's just an extension of the hobby to make replays now and then and I personally like hosting them myself (even though they're also mirrored on superplay and sometimes Youtube) so I can also fiddle with the site.

I actually like having the superplays on my hard drive. That said, I don't have very many of them saved, just few that are of particular interest to me or when the videos were a bitch to find in the first place. I like having the option of either downloading the video or streaming it, but I'm bad at doing this myself...only my few caravan game runs are available as both stream and download, the rest is either or.

I'm doing all my captures with a DVD recorder now instead of a USB dongle like before, so that helps in keeping the image quality up. Not worried about HD, since, well, I don't even have any consoles that do HD.

[Enhasa]

First a couple clarifications. xvid is a codec, mp4 is a container. You can put xvid in avi, mp4, mkv, etc, and you can put xvid, h264, etc in mp4. Nobody distributes lossless encodes (codecs include huffyuv, lagarith, etc), they are used for capturing. The popular codec to put in mp4 (and mkv) is h264. It wins hands down in quality / filesize ratio. The leading implementation of h264 is x264. If you're used to virtualdub, you can get this vfw encoder and use like xvid before. Or you could use command-line or some GUI like yamb.

x264 encodes do take longer than xvid ones. You can get good guidelines for settings to use so we don't have to bother going through all of them in this thread, but since you brought up encoding time, keep in mind that most people online tend to sacrifice shorter encoding time whenever possible to increase quality. I'm with you, so all I'm going to say is use a one-pass quality slider. Since your goal isn't to fit your video on a CD or something like that, the bitrate isn't what you care about, it's the quality level. This lets the encoder use more bits when necessary. That's why constant bitrate can look bad in parts, and why more than one pass is useful for average bitrate. If you don't care about bitrate, you don't need to go through two passes.

For audio, people use anything from mp3 to ac3 to aac to vorbis. It doesn't matter all that much, especially if you aren't using a really low bitrate, just pick one. I haven't recorded much recently, but I might as well add that I use h264 and vorbis in mkv using avisynth and virtualdubmod (because that's what I'm used to). I don't think it matters that I'm using relatively exotic codecs and containers, because anyone I would show anything already has mplayer, vlc, or ffdshow + haali splitter. So they don't care at all about the underlying codecs, because anything just works.


Direct downloads have their own niche, so stick with super-play. When it comes to streaming sites, there is one main question you need to ask yourself. Are you going to link anyone who cares yourself, using the site as convenient distribution, or do you care about random people discovering your replays? Nicovideo is like the Japanese Youtube. The primary benefit is the huge user base, which lets more people see your stuff (though some might argue the LCD, see any youtube comments). Drawbacks are well known.

zoome is like the Japanese stage6 (which has shut down). It's really better in almost all ways than the popular site, except in being popular. There's no ridiculous signing in like with nicovideo either. Since you brought up moderation concerns, the biggest draw of zoome in Japan occurred after nicovideo really started to crack down youtube-style on anime MAD remixes. At least for now, zoome is your best bet for a site without draconian IP policies. And it is #2 in popularity in Japan, which is not at all bad. KET uses zoome.

I've never used ustream myself, but I know for a fact that it does support capture cards. Tiki over at SDA does live Mega Man X runs with that exact setup.

[freddiebamboo]

Also, I'm not very keen on the idea of keeping gigs of superplays on my hard drive, so I'd prefer streaming.

Yup, good quality streaming is what I'd like to see. For games that I'm playing it's handy to have stage replays on your HD for quick reference, but many replays I just watch maybe once or twice.

Last time I cleaned up my hard drive I couldn't understand where all my hard disk space was being used up until I remembered my replay folder and got rid of about 15 gigs worth.

[FIL]

If you want to stream live like KET does you can use Mogulus.

[Enhasa]

Also, I'm not very keen on the idea of keeping gigs of superplays on my hard drive, so I'd prefer streaming.

Yup, good quality streaming is what I'd like to see. For games that I'm playing it's handy to have stage replays on your HD for quick reference, but many replays I just watch maybe once or twice.

Yep, when my HD crashed last year, losing all my work, games, roms, isos, music, etc sucked, but I'm actually glad I lost most of my replays, superplays, speedruns, TAS, etc. I think I was in the habit of holding on to them because download speeds used to be slower and I used to think that sites like super-play might shut down at any time. (The particularly funny one to me is because SDA looks kinda ghetto, at first I remember thinking it was flaky and would shut down soon, so I saved everything I downloaded... this whole thing is really, really not a worry to me anymore. )

Now I'm very anti-packrat and keep almost nothing (but rsync backup all the time anyway because why not). Not that I was anything close to a packrat before -- probably less so than the average person -- but it's really liberating and saves time and effort not to collect stuff. I'm in the minority around speedrun/TAS people, but as long as I can tell what's going on, that's fine. I know the games already. Typical streaming quality is good enough for me.


I still went with "download - lowest size" because for a superplay where you're not watching stuff rapidfire, I don't really care too much about buffering ahead. It's the benefit of that vs the drawback of shitty interface and functionality of streaming sites. Even with youtube for superplays, I'll usually download them, then delete them.

[Icarus]

CAPTURE HARDWARE
First, if you're planning on upping videos to Youtube to display in HD, you need something that will capture in HD, with a resolution at the very minimum 1280x720. I use a Blackmagic Intensity Pro as it has a variety of inputs including component, composite and HDMI. Everything gets routed through a DVDO iScan VP30 video scaler - console, computer output, digital camcorder, whatever - which is then sent via HDMI to my Intensity Pro. Capture is done in Premiere Pro CS3.

The Intensity Pro is quite cheap for what it does, but it only takes SD, 720 and 1080, so you need a workaround for it to take 480. The VP30, however, isn't cheap: I got mine from eBay and it cost nearly 300GBP.

It's a setup that's worked quite well for me so far, but if you look around, you can probably find something that's suited to your price range and needs.

Also note, if you're planning to capture in HD resolution, you'll need a RAID hard drive array to capture to. I have 2x 750GB drives in a striped RAID array which works well, though I'm going to add one more just for extra space and for data rate buffers.

YOUTUBE PRODUCTION
To ensure that Youtube displays your video in HD, you have to encode in h.264 (for video) and AAC-LC (for audio). I use Virtualdub to encode the video with x264VFW (a h.264 codec that can be used in standard VDub), while I use Quicktime to encode a seperate wave file from the video into AAC-LC. My settings are generally 2000kbps for video and 192kbps for audio. I then use a combination of YAMB and mp4muxer to combine everything into an .mp4 file for uploading.

Youtube does not like 60fps video, however, so you need to decimate the framerate by two (cut it to 30fps) before you upload there.

Some examples of HD Youtube videos I've been doing:
RF2 PC directfeed capture test
Dangun Feveron (Time Attack, 2.21mil, C/Bomb/4)
19XX (15.4mil ALL, Lightning) (playlist)

ALTERNATE DISTRIBUTION
Youtube suits my needs for the time being, but since you, DJI, do stuff with music, they might come down hard on you if they find out. You could try looking through this list of video sharing sites and see if there's something that fits your bill. I was going to suggest Vimeo as they have HD capability, but they're just as anal about copyright infringement as others.

Alternatively, you can get very good hosting services now for cheap. I hear Lunarpages is quite good, and they have a hosting package that includes unlimited bandwidth and storage. I have a 1.5TB space/15TB band package with them, and I haven't had cause to complain so far. I also have some of zakk's space, and I'm always indebted to him for letting me put stuff on there when I needed the space.

STREAMING
Not entirely sure on the streaming front, but I have thought about doing something similar to what you've been thinking about (a live stream of me playing random shooting games), though I think it'd be better if the stream was centered around actual score attack runs, so people can watch your progression and discuss technique and strategy as you're going at it. Have you looked into Veetle?

PERSONAL STORAGE
I used to burn stuff off onto DVD, but I've amassed about 75 DVDs worth of assorted replays the past 10 years (both downloaded and created by myself), so I invested in a 1TB external harddrive to keep everything on. Planning on making a NAS drive array to store all my stuff on sometime, once things get to the point where storage expansion is necessary.

[zakk]

You all knew I was going to respond to this, didn't you?

The quick recap of hardware I'm using:

1) iScan VP30. This thing is well worth the money. I haven't thrown any 15khz signal at it that it didn't handle. It even properly handles the dreaded Seibu 54hz. I'm only 'scaling' up to 480p for arcade stuff since any higher seems to be overkill.

2) Hauppauge HD-PVR. Component in up to 1080i, outputs H264+AAC (or AC3) over usb.


This is almost the perfect setup. I say almost because the HD-PVR is a little twitchy. It outputs H264 inside of transport stream; there are very few tools that can deal with this. The best bet is to remux it to MP4, although I've found sometimes the resulting MP4 file sometimes playback issues (weird speed problems).

The windows software for capturing is pretty crappy. The main problem being you can't turn off the preview (and thus you have to expend cpu to decode h264 while you capture.) There are some free 3rd party command line tools that will capture from it with no preview; not easy to setup/use but they do work.

On the Mac there are two pretty good programs for the HD-PVR; HDPVRCapture and EyeTV.

Right now my capture workflow is I capture something and then re-encode it to a lower bitrate h264 in MP4. This also allows me to do any rotating etc. I use mencoder command line to do this; on my quad-core box it encodes at almost 100fps (http://bigcore.rsdio.com/zakk/stuff/morecores.png)


For distribution I just use my "blog": http://bigcore.rsdio.com/zakk/replay

You can check out the results of my process there. The HD-PVR stuff starts with the Garegga videos. You'll note they play in the flash player; this is why I use H264+AAC+MP4; flash plays these files natively.

I don't bother with super-play because I suck. I've mostly ignored youtube.


Live streaming.

This is the crappy part. Most of the 'compressed' video capture solutions will not show up as a device that's useable by the various live streaming services. The best you can do is use the preview window of your capture software and then some other software that lets you broadcast a region of your desktop. I've been poking around at a way to do live streaming easily; if only to have people watch me restart RFJ 35 times before I ever see Sim 15.

The fuuuuuture

I've seriously considered implementing a site much like super-play, but with embedded flash playing of files. Sort of like youtube/nico etc. The biggest difference is that I'd implement it so it could handle tate videos correctly (i.e it would have a 3:4-ish layout option for videos).

The two big hurdles here are that 1) I have to just sit down and write the code for the site; this isn't all that hard but I'm lazy+busy at work. 2) Hosting. Bandwidth isn't the problem. Properly working uploads PLUS the CPU to re-encode everything to flash-playable files is the biggest problem. Basically every shared hosting solution is unacceptable for a site like this.


Oh! also. I like keeping copies of other people's replays locally. Streaming is good until the streaming services goes away or the person removes the files for whatever reason. My replay directory is currently 79 gigs.