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[Miller]

Here are some infos all related to uploading and posting videos here that were unfortunately dispersed throughout the message board because I was haphazardly asking about the stuff in different places, while Madness was still good enough to post answers here and there. I guess, since it’s my fault this valuable information got scattered, I’ll try to round it up a bit for the sake of ease in accessing it in future, as well as to provide a place for further questions on the topic. I have some more of those now, in fact.

First thing I'll mention all of "LoXodonte" are slowly getting uploaded onto Driver Madness and every single time LoXodonte uploads a video and gives me information on it I'll add it to the downloads on the download database.

You can visit LoXodonte's videos section by clicking here I've been talking to LoXodonte and he has decided to upload the video file only rather than the entire package with the codec package and everything. Just to make viewing quicker and simpler.

Is the Videos forum only for posting videos or links to videos or also for the discussion of making and showing videos?

The Videos forum area was really designed for Google Videos, like one post for each video, I haven't gotten to completing that area yet as I haven't really defined the future of those sections yet.

The dimensions of the video don't really matter all that much, on YouTube there is no point making it to large because YouTube automatically down scales it, where Google Video usually keeps most of your video and with Driver Madness, we keep the video the way you sent it to us and users get to download it in full quality.

Yah, man. Over at YouTube your videos are evidently limited to 100MB and 10min. I still divided Vegas Jump Run into two parts and submitted that at YouTube along with a link to DriverMadness.net. I did the same at Google Video, but was able to submit the same video in one contiguous file, which they went ahead and hosted.

So usually adding it to driver madness downloads section is the best idea for keeping all your quality and we don't mind how much space you use up as long as the video is somewhat compressed and looks alright it can go up there with all the other driver content.

So keep the dimensions (pixels) high for Driver Madness and Google Video. Keep them low for YouTube because you tube keeps the quality down and makes it look and sound crap.

Yah, man, the quality of a video downloaded here at DriverMadness.net is much better than that of the same video viewed elsewhere. I think the download speeds here are very good, too. It would be nice if Babbs would also host his DRIV3R video downloads here because it takes like two hours to download a video over there that is the same size download as stuff I got from DriverMadness.net that only took ten minutes to download here.

I always hated YouTube because of their low compressed crappy quality videos. However due to a sudden urge in requests I may end up adding YouTube functionality.

If you wish to upload a video now you'll need a Google account, then you go go to video.google.com and login then you'll have a Video Upload tab you can click there and then you should be directed to some sort of uploading form.

Then you can put the url "[gvideo] URL [/gvideo]" like so, and if your using a different version of google video make sure it says .com on the end rather than .co.uk or .nz or .com.au or anything like that make sure it uses the .com domain or it won't work.

and then you'll have a video in your post.

[hr]

These days we are allowing users to upload high quality videos on the Driver Madness server for downloading which totally beats the quality of Google Video and YouTube videos but together and you can get that true full screen feel with the video.

You could do what other users are starting to do and have your username or something that identify you and have your own entire section for all the videos you create.
http://www.drivermadness.net/main/dload ... &cat_id=46

Hopefully this answers all your questions...

Yes, and thanks very much, indeed, boss. I appreciate all that. Yet again, DriverMadness.net proves to be the place to go for Driver related content, in this case killer in-game videos.

I've been talking to LoXodonte and he has decided to upload the video file only rather than the entire package with the codec package and everything. Just to make viewing quicker and simpler.

I was wondering what was going on, there, because I get mixed up easily, and I thought I was remembering downloading DRIV3R videos all from here, including Babbs’s, but I guess his were always coming from Box.net then. But in my head the process was: download .RAR or.ZIP archive; extract; and then view (or install accompanying codec, and then view). Then, just recently, a couple weeks after posting some of these questions about videos, I came back this weekend, but didn’t see these replies before going to check on more stuff to look at in the downloads section first. Even after I went to one of these threads to erase my blemishes on the thread, I didn’t realize you even posted there because I wound up on a page where my questions were in the last post on the page, and I somehow thought that was the end of that thread, and saw later that you had actually promptly replied a couple weeks ago.

Over in the downloads area this weekend, though, when I clicked on the download button for the Driver 2 GBA video, I didn’t get a download window pop up, as before, but instead my Windows Media Player launched and the video started playing immediately. So, I was all jumping for joy about that, saying to myself, “LOL, this Madness dude is a trip. Going at this webmaster stuff big-time.”

After finishing some more story episodes and then perusing the general forums for a few days, I spent the last couple of weekends working on a video called Vegas Jump Run that I was telling you guys about in a thread called “What’s your favorite thing to do in Driver 2?” So, I decided to download some of the videos I had already seen either here or elsewhere so I could look at what their properties were to see if it would help me choose from the options for saving a finished movie file in this Windows Movie Maker deal on my computer. Never thought I would have a use for that—guess I was wrong—fun to use. I read that WMM sucks, maybe read that here. Anyway, I was surprised when I also didn’t get a download window pop up when I clicked to download videos from LoXodonte here at DM.net, but had to use the context menu (right click) and select Save As. With those videos my Windows Media Player launched immediately upon clicking the download button as well. So, I thought my memory was still just betraying me, as usual, which happens easily when trying to deal with all this stuff that seems so foreign to me.

So, anyway, to get to the next point, it took about 10 minutes before these videos started playing that were in the 150MB range, whereas your Driver 2 GBA video (~2MB) began playing immediately. I guess, boss, that you are trying to create a online video viewing environment here rather than just a place to download videos to view offline. I have to say, that totally rules, especially since you allow for higher quality videos to be shown than they do elsewhere.

I’m curious, though. Is there a video format and some associated specs that you could tell us about that would allow the videos to stream in chunks or packets or whatever rather than waiting until the entire file downloaded before it started to play? Does your website accommodate that sort of video viewing? Is this about what kind of video file it is, or about how it is being downloaded regardless of file type? Does it have as much to do with your controls on a download page or is it something the user controls in the way he chooses to download a video? I mean, like the way you can either right click and select Save Target As or left click to download and play, is there also something the user can do to determine whether the video will be entirely downloaded before playing or streamed instead?

I see in my Windows Movie Maker options for saving a completed movie file, everything from “38Kbps” to “2.1Mbps”. What’s that, for the data rate, or bit rate, at which playback is intended for a video file? If you make a video with a faster bit rate can ppl with slower connection speeds still view it well enough? I have no way to test that.

[hr]
Recently I asked the boss how you go about uploading a video to DriverMadness.net. Here is a link to that thread. How do you upload a video?

Is it okay to place titles at the beginning or end of a Driver video that promote the DriverMadness website?

Here is a link to a thread in which Madness and Moonchild offer information about capturing your Driver gameplay so you can make videos from the data. Capturing games to video file

[madness]

Yah, man, the quality of a video downloaded here at DriverMadness.net is much better than that of the same video viewed elsewhere. I think the download speeds here are very good, too. It would be nice if Babbs would also host his DRIV3R video downloads here because it takes like two hours to download a video over there that is the same size download as stuff I got from DriverMadness.net that only took ten minutes to download here.

I've tried my best to search for the best quality content on the web rather than finding a low quality version since many people prefer to see more quality in what they watch.

I'm allowed to host all of the videos babbs makes here. But I haven't gotten to the stage of downloading the new ones he has uploaded to his server to be downloaded and added onto this server.

When I'm able to download them and upload them here everyone will be able to enjoy the faster speeds. I think we also have to consider babbs is also running his own server rather than having them properly hosted.

Over in the downloads area this weekend, though, when I clicked on the download button for the Driver 2 GBA video, I didn’t get a download window pop up, as before, but instead my Windows Media Player launched and the video started playing immediately. So, I was all jumping for joy about that, saying to myself, “LOL, this Madness dude is a trip. Going at this webmaster stuff big-time.”

Now everything in the download database is meant for download and not for streaming and this issue seems to occur with some computers/browsers but really depending on your pc's settings.

The whole thing was originally set up for offline viewing. Ages ago in the old days I always zipped videos up because of this issue but then I worked out that it does it on very few computers depending on their settings.

I haven't looked into the settings yet so I'm unable to tell you what you should change. I'm only believe your using Internet Explorer rather than Firefox. Both browsers have the drawbacks and has the other things which make it better.

Firefox is better at downloading things from here while Firefox doesn't work when creating posts the best. When you insert bbcode using the automatic bbcode feature you'll notice a few annoying problems sending you back to the top of the page when you insert some.

But I'm here to tell you about viewing videos at DriverMadness. We have primarily selected Google Video for the video streaming as video is never degraded and we use the download database to keep it for offline viewing as well as keeping it to it's exact same quality, as you upload it. I guess google video does make a few changes which could degrade the quality a bit but nothing to large.

Secondly you can see that the google videos are showing up relatively small just like the youtube videos. I told the script to keep it large but for some reason it decided to change it's self on me so I'll go back into the code and change it back when ever I'm in the code department next.

I cannot say much about windows media player automatically streaming some video files but I'll look into that soon.

Regards,
Driver Madness