is super-play.co.uk dead?

[brokenhalo]

it's been almost a year since any new submissions have been uploaded. i was just wondering if anyone here knew what was going on with that site.

[Ruldra]

I've been wondering this as well. I sent a replay to them in November but still no upload.

[hail good sir]

of

[brokenhalo]

someone ought to take him up on it before the site just disappears. that would be a shame to lose such an awesome resource.

[Elixir]

I'm not surprised. The website is incredibly resource dependent, and provides direct downloads of videos in hundreds of megabytes - literally no anonymous user is going to care for the webhoster's bandwidth usage.

Someone should just split the videos into parts and upload them to Youtube instead.

[moozooh]

YouTube sucks. Many of the superplays already suffer from bad quality issues, YouTube will only exaggerate them. Downsampling 60 fps videos to 30 fps and losing resolution in many cases is hardly a viable option, too.

I have a better idea: have a few seedbox servers working 24/7 with at least two full copies of the site's superplay set, and distribute them via BitTorrent (so that every item has at least two seeds at any given time). For one, I could help seed every superplay I got from the site. I'm sure there are users out there who are in possession of personal servers with low monthly costs that could help out with this, too.

[EDIT] Scratch that, I looked at the total size of the current stuff. I can seed all of it easily, I just need a couple more people for support.

Pros:
— pretty much zero expenses for the site itself, since it only hosts small .torrent files which by themselves don't consume any bandwidth to speak of;
— no hoster-side enforced caps;
— very high potential download speed for popular replays;
— every item is mirrored at least once, thus reduced chance of downtime;
— less risk of infringement-related problems for copyrighted content (at least stuff that is out of print and only available on secondary market; i. e., every superplay DVD older than three years) because the site won't host it per se;
— keeps the resource alive.

Cons:
— some people still can't use BitTorrent for shit;
— unless the seedboxes' uplink amounts to 150+ KB/s, unpopular runs may take a while to download (then again, speeds aren't too great now either);
— some donations may be required to build the necessary infrastructure (new harddrives mainly, since the site has a lot of stuff).

What is required:
— 2+ computers working 24/7 with decent uplink (preferably over 100 KB/s), no monthly bandwidth caps, and enough HDD space to host the entire site's content plus some extra for new submissions (can do; my uplink is over 1.3 MB/s currently and will likely increase in foreseeable future);
— an FTP server for new submissions (we can use the current one if Robert doesn't mind);
— 2–4 knowledgeable people to sort through submissions, weed out unpublishable files, and deal with problematic ones (I can help with that);
— some coordinated effort and help from volunteers and donors.

What can be achieved:
— the site will be able to continue active functioning for as long as necessary;
— download speeds will be much higher than currently for popular publications (the more popular, the faster — very useful for tourneys and new publications in general);
— theoretically, every aspect of site maintenance will be decentralized and distributed (for better or for worse, but in this case probably for better).

[clp]

why not upload them all to vimeo? it supports high quality and is just simply a million times better than pootube.

[Elixir]

How about a Youtube/Nicovideo shmup archive, since not many people seem to be keen on a user-reliant seedbox.

All material from Youtube and Nicovideo exists already, and the stuff from super-play that doesn't exist on either can still be uploaded.

I think a good portion of the shmup videos, or at least the ones from Nicovideo, are uploaded by their original creator (therefore eliminating copyright issues).

[linko9]

Certainly nothing wrong with putting them on youtube, but it would be a shame if the original videos were lost and only the YT uploads remained. How much bandwidth does shmups.com have? I know nothing about how much it costs to host that amount of gaglerbytage, so sorry if it's a dumb question.

[moozooh]

Forums don't weigh much per se, thanks to the wonders of GZip compression. In any case the amount of data is at least an order of magnitude lower than Super-Play's. Can't say much about served bandwidth, though.

[brokenhalo]

youtube isn't really viable imo because of the quality issues already mentioned.

the seedbox idea is great in theory, but i see two possible issues. the first is that i don't think enough people will reseed ( a common problem with all torrents) so the bulk of the bandwidth will be on the seed servers and it will take forever to dl a file. second issue is related to the first: your ISP shuts you off cause you're killing their bandwidth. unless you throttle the connections which is hardly ideal.

vimeo sounds like a great way to go about things. $60 a year for a premium account. that gets you 5gb a week of uploads, and unlimited bandwidth. hmmm...

[crithit5000]

it's been almost a year since any new submissions have been uploaded. i was just wondering if anyone here knew what was going on with that site.

In the past few months, I've been mulling over writing a Ikaruga.co.uk/Super-Play.co.uk RIP thread here. Sure, it's still up but as you stated rj hasn't uploaded anything for quite some time and the forums are a complete ghost town only frequented by spammers and me (mainly to clean up the spam). On occasion I've used mobile phones we use for testing at work to look up the site and erroneously get passed off to snackbox.org (snacky's server). To answer the thread topic's question, I'd say it's most certainly a zombie at this time.

I've been wondering this as well. I sent a replay to them in November but still no upload.

You can still try emailing rj (rjpageuk@super-play.co.uk) and cross your fingers. Although I'm sure I've said that like 50 times in the last year to all kinds of folks with no proper resolution.

I remember reading a post on the Ikaruga boards where rjpageuk said he was either too busy or just didn't care anymore, and actually half jokingly offered to give the site to someone. So I'd be surprised if anyone at all even logs in to sort though those replays anymore.

That offer was directed towards me, and knowing rj he probably wasn't joking at all. I've been around both Ikaruga.co.uk/Super-Play for a long time, and I've always been a firm believer in the sites and always helped out whenever I could. I haven't talked to rj about since he made that post, though. And I'd love to take the sites on and do them justice, but I do worry about the overhead involved.

Since this is my lunch break and it's ending shortly, I'm going to hold off on the whole shmup torrent debacle for now. But I'll return later to weigh in on that and other whatnot concerning these sites.

[crithit5000]

btwhi I like snacks and plasmo is god.

[hail good sir]

years

[Zeether]

why not upload them all to vimeo? it supports high quality and is just simply a million times better than pootube.

Vimeo doesn't allow game videos and only allows hipster shithead vlogs.

[brokenhalo]

why not upload them all to vimeo? it supports high quality and is just simply a million times better than pootube.

Vimeo doesn't allow game videos and only allows hipster shithead vlogs.

wow that is pretty lame.... just ran across a site called wegame http://www.wegame.com/. anybody have any experience with that site? seems ok.

[rjpageuk]

Thanks brokenhalo for pointing me toward this thread.

I think I have said it a number of times already but feel it is worth reiterating: I am sorry for my inactivity on the site over the past year or so. I have simply moved on to other things, and dont have the time or inclination to work on super-play (even though it didnt take much work in the first place). I feel guilty having let people down who have submitted super-plays in good faith, so I am sorry about that.

I was serious in my post about letting someone else have the site and am more than happy to pass it over to you crithit5000 so you have first refusal. I am sorry for leaving you to sort things out, and appreciate the work you have done.

I think I have already sorted out with snacky to host ikaruga.co.uk on the old server so that will continue to live as is (not 100% sure of that), but really it is the videos of super-play that need somewhere to live. I currently pay for 2 accounts with dreamhost which costs around $250 a year and Stefano/fontaz also mirrors them for me on another dreamhost account. There are about 90GB of files and the site does a pretty consistent 300-400GB/month traffic.

I can easily transfer the files to another server but I guess the mysql database which holds info on the games / super-plays might also be useful. Just organise what I need to do between the interested parties and I will do it.

[brokenhalo]

thanks for the quick reply RJ.

if the cost of running the site is in the $250 a year range, that's small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. if you wanted to take over the site crithit5000, i'm willing to contribute financially and time-wise to the site. i'm sure others here would chip in a few bucks as well to keep it going.

[hail good sir]

long

[gameoverDude]

WeGame sounds promising, but too bad it's currently for Windows only- it needs PS3 and 360 versions also. Shame about Vimeo allowing only that Vlog crap.

[crithit5000]

I am sorry for leaving you to sort things out, and appreciate the work you have done.

Life happens rj, so don't even sweat it. In fact, I should be thanking you for running these sites for so long out of your own pocket and some Paypal donations.

I was serious in my post about letting someone else have the site and am more than happy to pass it over to you crithit5000 so you have first refusal.

I get nervous just thinking about it, but I think if enough people still feel the need to have a site like SuperPlay still around and some of them are actually willing and able to (this is key) help run, maintain, and keep the thing fresh then perhaps I should take it.

Bah, stupid lunch hour's almost over again =/

[rjpageuk]

How are we going to do this then? How much expertise do you have on scp/mysql databases?

I am happy to pass on my login details to you for the webhost but it contains a pile of personal stuff also so will probably need to be transferred to another account/webhost.

[crithit5000]

How much expertise do you have on scp/mysql databases?

Absolutely none in SCP, but I just looked up a few things about it and it seems pretty straightforward. MySQL and databases I know plenty about, so not really a problem. Only thing is now I don't have hosting, which really isn't a problem as I can get hosting easily; I'm just iffy about who to go to for hosting (Lunarpages ended up effing me over last year). Would it just be simpler to just start an account at DreamHost and transfer SuperPlay to the new account? Please Advise!

EDIT: How many times can I say 'hosting' in one sentence? Damn!

[zakk]

My personal dreamhost account is actually 'unlimited' and would probably accommodate the entire site.

However, I'd really consider moving to some sort of VPS or dedicated solution where you have more control over the box. You need to either setup ftp and/or http based uploads and I'm not sure dreamhost is too keen on having you run semi-public ftp accounts on their shared boxes. Unless you guys are already doing that now; but I seem to recall from the past you were running the ftp on someone's dedicated server.

I did some quick estimations of pushing most of the data to amazon S3 but I think at the current bandwidth use of the site it's probably a bit much for most people (approx $100/month)

[Erhune]

If the new maintainer of the site chooses the way of Bittorent distribution, I can offer to host the current and future dataset as webseeds on 2 different dedicated servers: one in France, and the other in Japan, each with more-or-less 100 Mbps bandwitdh. I'll just need a way to fetch a copy of the whole set and maintain it up-to-date (for example by having a simple text file listing all available videos, accessible by a daily update script). Just PM me for the practical details and stuff, if you're interested.

(This post just reminded me that I sent my Kamui 35.98M replay for publication almost 1 year ago... Time really do flee, boys!)

[rjpageuk]

My personal dreamhost account is actually 'unlimited' and would probably accommodate the entire site.

However, I'd really consider moving to some sort of VPS or dedicated solution where you have more control over the box. You need to either setup ftp and/or http based uploads and I'm not sure dreamhost is too keen on having you run semi-public ftp accounts on their shared boxes. Unless you guys are already doing that now; but I seem to recall from the past you were running the ftp on someone's dedicated server.

My dreamhost accounts are unlimited too, that wasnt really the problem. The problem is that each account wouldnt deal enough bandwidth to serve 400GB+ a month so users would get very poor download speeds (and it would even affect the usability of the site). This is why at present the site is hosted on one account and the filed distributed from another 2 accounts.

You are right about the FTP too, thats done on the old ikaruga dedicated server that snacky is still using!

(This post just reminded me that I sent my Kamui 35.98M replay for publication almost 1 year ago... Time really do flee, boys!)

Did it ever get authorized?

[Erhune]

(This post just reminded me that I sent my Kamui 35.98M replay for publication almost 1 year ago... Time really do flee, boys!)

Did it ever get authorized?

Nope. But I think I had bad luck since I submitted it just when the site started to be abandoned. But I don't blame anyone, I always found it pretty incredible to have such a great and fast access to so many good videos. If somebody put the whole thing back on its feets, I'll be glad to resubmit it along a few other ones.

[system11]

That's interesting - accounts have maximum speeds? I'm surprised people were downloading approximately 4 times the entire site size every month, I suppose that's lazy people not actually saving them to HD each time. This forum server has more than enough bandwidth (3.0TB allocation), but not enough disk space - can't help.

[crithit5000]

You need to either setup ftp and/or http based uploads and I'm not sure dreamhost is too keen on having you run semi-public ftp accounts on their shared boxes.

You are right about the FTP too, thats done on the old ikaruga dedicated server that snacky is still using!

For some reason I totally forgot where the submission queue ended up and while I'm a bit better off than I have been in years right now, I'm unsure if I'm able to swing the equivalent of 4 servers. This may have to turn into some sort of committee-type affair of some sort, which would probably be for the best as a project this large doesn't need a sole person to disappear off the face of the earth and end up exactly back at this step the site is at now (although this isn't the exact scenario that played out with SuperPlay, as there a few contributing members who all sort of disappeared over time...need to avoid that problem as well). So here's sort of where I stand right now:

• I have a semi-decent amount of cash at the moment I can invest into this (I'll currently say US$500 a year right now)
• I have plenty of experience in PHP, MySQL, MSSQL, and all sorts of server environments plus sane web design.
• While I think the BT idea is good, I don't think it's good enough to entirely replace the current way of doing things. As I said to moozooh, it might be nice to add as an addition to the normal downloads but even then I lean towards that it should be a 'you do it or you don't' type thing. I do think themed torrents (one of entire game, STGT, certain players) would be damn awesome.
• While I don't have a huge amount of free time, I have plenty enough each day to sit down and watch videos and moderate a forum (still!) and the usual whatnot probably involved with running a site like this.

So what I'm basically saying is I can't do this 100% alone, and a few people like brokenhalo have mentioned helping out with things like cash and running the site. We need to coral all the folk who want to be involved with this, and we need to have a plan. I figure if people here can scrape enough cash together to get a Ketsui board to guru, then maybe we can pull this one off as well. So, anyone officially in or...?

[moozooh]

I don't have any reasonable amount of cash to share (at least not at the moment; though I guess that's been covered for the most part), but I'm able and have enough time to watch, write, download, and seed.