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Trixter
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 19, 2002 10:52 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

We knew that copies were inevitable (it's a lot of work to make a DVD that is difficult to copy), so I didn't bother trying to make it uncopyable. I can only hope that we sell all of them so that we have capital to make more volumes. That's really all there is to it. If we don't sell all of them, the likelyhood of a second, third, etc. volume is greatly reduced.
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Sesse
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 19, 2002 1:50 pm    Post subject: Re: Cheapest price for Europe Reply with quote

BladeRunner wrote:
In the following months all of the stamped DVDs will be sold. And in 2 years time it will be something that very few people will own.


Umm, I do hope that if all the stamped DVDs will be sold and there is still demand, there will be pressed out more? Somebody? :-)
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dmw
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Joined: 30 Jan 2002
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Location: Oregon

PostPosted: Sat Dec 21, 2002 5:51 pm    Post subject: Re: Cheapest price for Europe Reply with quote

BladeRunner wrote:
In the following months all of the stamped DVDs will be sold. And in 2 years time it will be something that very few people will own. The oldest demo scene CD that I have got is Freedom. I think that owning a copy instead of the original wouldn't produce me the same feelings after 7 years.


The Escape CD is the rare one - 500 produced. First press = 300 CD's - blue/black art on CD. The secon run produced 200 CD's with yellow and green art on the CD and no booklet art but a photo copy.

As for doing a repress of MindCandy we would have to be able to have enough orders for about 400-500 to justify a repress (of another 1000).

By March I'm sure we will be able to say yes/no on a repress.

-dan
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ivses
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 22, 2002 12:50 am    Post subject: Repress Reply with quote

I wouldn't advice to wait and see if a repress is made if you can get the DVDs *NOW*. Wink

I wish I had an Escape CD. I will put myself in the list to get it repressed. Very Happy
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urnlzmuhu
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 04, 2003 12:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Actually, the DemoDVD is already released as SVCD. I found the following info in the DVD Rip section at www.isonews.com:

01/02/2003 SVCD Mind Candy Volume 1 DISC2 eleetSVCD [3 CDs]
01/02/2003 SVCD Mind Candy Volume 1 DISC1 eleetSVCD [2 CDs]


.. i think it's sad that some people tend to warez everything they get ahold of, and whats even more sad is that some sceners actually asked me where they could download this when i posted the following info in a chan at irc. I won't mention any names though. The DemoDVD project is not a project of Wollyhood so everyone that is just the least interested in this dvd should buy it, then maybe we'll get a follow up some day.

// Tobias 'A_Lee_N' Lind
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phoenix
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 04, 2003 7:31 am    Post subject: l337 r1pp3rz Reply with quote

Woohoo! Recognition! Does this mean "we've made it"? Boy, props to eleetSVCD for sticking it to the man! ("the man" in this case being Jim or Dan). If people want 5 CDs of low-quality video, I guess they now know where to go. And it took them 3 weeks after release to rip it? Sheesh, whatever happened to 0-day warez? These groups need to get movin'!

A_Lee_N, you're welcome to send me names in email. Smile

P.S. If they have a loader for it, maybe we can feature it in our next volume. Laughing
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dmw
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Joined: 30 Jan 2002
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 04, 2003 9:26 am    Post subject: sVCD rip Reply with quote

A_Lee_N wrote:
and whats even more sad is that some sceners actually asked me where they could download this when i posted the following info in a chan at irc.


It is not obvious where this SVCD collection can be downloaded... And, in the US there are a lot of players that don't support SVCD. So, I guess you can say I'm not too worried.

I keep a list of all the people/addresses I send the DVD to...if we knew where "eleetSVCD" is located we can probably narrow down who the person is and write them a nasty letter Twisted Evil

Or we can just send to this e-mail address : eleetsvcd@hotmail.com if it still works.

-dan
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 04, 2003 10:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The funniest part of this is that it not only takes FIVE CDs to hold the disc, but the modern side is 480x480 at ~1800kbps -- which is half the average bitrate but not half the frame size! Not to mention that I used many quantization tricks that were appropriate to the source material that they didn't know about... Yeah, I'll bet it looks *real* good Wink

Bottom line is that SVCD rips of movies work because movies are 24 images per second. MindCandy is 60 images per second, so ripping it to CDs doesn't make any damn sense unless you're going to make a Half-D1 out of it (352x480). But then horizontal details disappear.

All DVDs are rippable. There is no technique you can use to prevent ripping a DVD. I think our product is the most "resistant" because it's on two sides, has everything mashed together in a single PGC, and 1/3rd of the value is the featurette which is getting lost in the rip.

Future volumes of MindCandy may be authored "properly" (multiple VTSes, PGC, chapters lining up properly, etc.) but I am still an advocate of the double-sided DVD for this kind of material since it makes ripping a pain in the ass.
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 05, 2003 3:08 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Okay, it appears as if my cookies are screwed up. Smile

-- Trixter
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robotriot
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 06, 2003 3:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

"Irc.: #ESVCD at efnet"

sounds interesting :) i did a search for mindcandy on emule, but it only returned two versions of the trailer. if it's not on the edonkey network yet, there's still hope ;)
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Vortex/Digital Oblivion
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 06, 2003 3:47 am    Post subject: I also want a sticker!!! Reply with quote

Where's my sticker? Confused Hehehe

To everyone involved with making this DVD - a HUGE thumbs up! I limit myself to a couple of the demos a day because I end up coming up with tons of inspiration from each demo (and have to try implement them) but so far I'm very impressed! Very Happy

So does anyone here know about the South African demo movement?
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urnlzmuhu
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PostPosted: Wed Jan 08, 2003 7:56 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

phoenix: Well, i wont mention any names as i stated above. I think it's their problem if they want to ruin the experience by downloading a low quality SVCD rip of the DVD. I just recieved my copy and i think it's quite obvious that huge amounts of time and love went into the making of it and i seriously doubt that any SVCD rip will come anywhere near the real stuff. When they asked me where to get it, i told them to buy it from any of the distributors mentioned on the homepage, if they don't want to pay for it they can always download the original demos and run them.

dmw: I guess you don't have the adresses of the guys that has ordered from the other sources presented on the homepage though?

trixter: My point exactly.

Anyway, i really love the DVD because of the time that went down on it. You can feel that this is high quality stuff and i'm really looking forward to the day if and when it gets released. I really think you should start selling this at the major scene parties at a reasonable price, availability is comfort so it might even stop a few guys from downloading the SVCD.

PS. I didn't get a sticker either, nor a postcard. Sad

// A_Lee_N
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hhfql
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PostPosted: Thu Jan 09, 2003 9:39 pm    Post subject: No offense but... Reply with quote

This isn't exactly a blockbuster title, I was unaware of it until it showed up on slashdot. This explains why it took 3 weeks to rip (as opposed to being out before the theater release like episode 2 or two towers) and is only available in the crappy bloated SVCD format.

I expect a divx or xvid 1cd rip of it will probably show up. You're right in copy protecting the dvd being a waste of time, as it's pretty much impossible to keep people from defeating it these days.

This is not to imply I'm advocating ripping this title, I'm currently buying 3 of them (1 for me, 2 for other friends). Do you ship to south africa?

Also, are the original demo authors getting anything from the sales? Have you contacted them for permission to use their work? I'm just curious, I'd hate to see such wonderful art and know the people who made it have been totally screwed.

BTW, how exactly are you managing 60 frames per second on NTSC that only supports 60 interlaced fields per second? No matter how you slice it, it's really only a 30 frame per second update. Unless you're losing half the frame data in interlacing, in which case it's still the equivalent of 30 frames per second.

The limitation on reproducing this isn't inherant in codecs like divx, it's in the file container format such as AVI, which doesn't support this kind of frame structure. Newer containers such as mcf/matroska, and ogm may be able to handle this, though interlacing sucks anyway. I'd rather just have 30fps progressive than see the interlacing artifacts at 60fps. Hopefully if this title is ripped they'll at least use a decent deinterlacer to reconstruct the progressive frames and not lose any data.
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Trixter
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PostPosted: Thu Jan 09, 2003 11:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

There's a lot in your last post that I'd like to tackle, so get a sandwich Smile

Actually, The Two Towers was not available before the movie -- what was encoded was a promotional telesync sent to theaters, just like always. It's good, but it's not a DVD rip.

Dan handles fullfillment, but he's at CES right now so he'll be able to answer your shipping question when he gets back in four days.

I'm not worried about a 1 CD divx rip, it will automatically be missing half the frames (see below) so it will look like shite. Plus there's no way it fits on a single CD -- it's 4 hours long (and NOT film -- 24p is a hell of a lot easier to put on CD than 30i).

The original authors gave permission for everything on the DVD. Since we didn't know if we would break even or not (and a profit is even less likely), they were offered a free DVD for every production on it. If they didn't like that or didn't want to give permission, they didn't have to. Thankfully, most of them did. But EVERYTHING on the DVD had the permission of the original authors (except for David's work, of course).

As for your video information, some of it is wrong -- I hope you won't mind if I correct some misconceptions. First, when I say 60 frames per second, I am quasi-speaking in "demospeak" and what I really mean is 60 discrete images per second. These are fields, of course, and there are two fields to a frame, so when you watch the DVD you are seeing 60 different images a second, not 30. If it were 30, it wouldn't be smooth. Each field is different. So the "framerate", if you want to calculate it, is 720x240 at 60 images per second. If that doesn't make sense, let me know and I can try to clarify.

Secondly, you say that the limitation of high-rate .AVI is in the container format and not the codec. That's wrong -- AVI supports any framerate you give it. 60fps 720x240 material is entirely possible in DivX, but the processor requirements of playing back such a stream are so ludicrously high that only 2.4GHz machines can do it. It's not practical. MPEG-2 is, since it supports interlacing, and can be decompressed at full rate on a 400MHz machine without any acceleration. I won't go into it further, but you can tell I'm not a fan of DivX and in fact I think it has done much more harm to desktop video than good. It's not proper MPEG-4.

Also, you write "I'd rather see 30p than 30i" -- not with demos you wouldn't. Part of the fun of demos is how liquidy-smooth they are, and 30p would have noticable judder. In fact, try this: Play MindCandy on a real set-top DVD player connected to a TV, like maybe the opening swooping panning of Mikrostrange, and then play that sequence again on a software DVD player (automatically bobs the footage to 30p) and you *will* notice it is not as smooth.

Finally, you write "Hopefully... they'll at least use a decent deinterlacer to reconstruct the progressive frames" -- but that's impossible, since the source was interlaced to begin with. I didn't start with 480p because there is currently no way to capture 480p with conventional video hardware -- it just doesn't exist in the consumer range (meaning, to capture 480p from VGA would have required a unit costing about $60,000 and additional hardware to make sense of the capture).

Anyway, sorry for being so anal, but I wanted to make sure people weren't under any misconceptions. A 30fps DivX .AVI will automatically throw away half the information, and a 60fps DivX .AVI is unplayable on most machines due to lack of processor power.

Hey, I didn't spend 2.5 years learning about video standards for nothing Wink
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hhfql
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 10, 2003 1:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ok granted, the pre-release rips are usually bad quality, and I despise them because they ruin the whole experience of seeing a movie on the big screen for the first time. I refuse to download them despite how available they are.

4 hours is definately not going to go to a 1 CD rip, you're right. I was unaware the DVD had so much footage. It may appear as 2 CDs or more likely cut up as the individual demos around 50-200MB each.

I'm glad the authors were willing to go along with it, it makes me feel better.

I'd like to argue the concept of an interlaced field update being a "discrete image". It's either the odd or even lines of a discrete image, not a full discrete image. If you were to view the fields individually without the image data for the other half of the lines from the previous frame, you wouldn't like what you saw.

The limitation on AVI comes from the "one frame in one frame out" policy. Thus you can't do things like sample a video at 60fps and output 30fps progressive, and most vob files will identify their framerate to the system with respect to the framerate, not the field rate, so you never get a 60fps input. I'm wondering if there's a way around this, it's theoretically possible to write custom tools and codecs to support it, but it's too much work. You'd need to write an mpeg2 decoder to advertise 60fps, then output the half res images to the codec, then on playback have the player reconstruct the interlacing at 30hz... nah.

And yes I'd always rather see progressive frames than see comb artifacts on motion. I'd shoot the guy who decided interlacing should be standard but I believe he's already dead. Not as smooth vs not as blurry. Tough call to make but I hate blurry.

Mmm I'd have to research on capturing 480p, but I'm skeptical there's NO conventional low cost hardware that does it. What about VGA->S-video then capture on any modern graphics card with capture? There'd be some conversion loss but I've captured 720x480 images @30fps without framedrops on a radeon and a gf4. 60fps 480p would likely be very difficult or expensive however.

Checking math, 720x240 @60fps vs 720x480 @30fps, multiplies out to the same number to me. Where's half the information lost?

As for CPU use, a 720x480 divx5 scaled up and interpolated takes about 30% on my athlon XP 1800+. 60fps shouldn't take much more than double that number. It would be less feasible than mpeg2 in terms of cpu power but not unfeasible.

I'm not a big fan of divx either, which is why I've spent the last 2 years designing and writing a codec to replace it. Not quite done yet. =)
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