pouët.net

How do I DL HD DTV?

category: general [glöplog]
12:50. Restate my assumptions.
1. A demo's H264 1900kbps video is of sufficient visual quality for to enjoy all the effects and not notice the compression artifacts.
2. The need to browse for demos, select the desired settings, wait for them to load and finally watch them at low frame rates kills all the fun.
3. Storage is affordable enough that all of DTV converted to HD can be stored locally (the 850 Realtime demos will weight only about ~400GB)
4. We will then have a seamless demoshow that can run on cheap hardware and requires no internet connection.
5. ????
6. PROFIT!!!

Of course, there's only like ~100 HD demo videos on DTV at the moment, so we will at first have a pretty short selection and will have to wait for the other good demos to be kkaptured, converted and uploaded. However, even downloading the existing HD demos is problematic: the access to
http://mp4vod.demoscene.tv/, the DTV MP4 depository, is forbidden, and manual download is not an option. Can you please advise me on a suitable web spider that would find all the mp4 files there and download them? Or, perhaps, a way to get access to that server...
Thanks in advance!
added on the 2008-04-29 00:16:42 by s2rm s2rm
Quote:

6: PROFIT!!!


Profit? Like, making money?
added on the 2008-04-29 00:23:25 by iks iks
1. depends on framerate and resolution and material. believe me.

and: wurstcaptures.untergrund.net
added on the 2008-04-29 00:25:18 by raer raer
irirokos, you are obviously no south park connaisseur :P
added on the 2008-04-29 00:25:26 by dipswitch dipswitch
2. Welcome to pouet.
added on the 2008-04-29 00:26:06 by raer raer
touché, i ain't :) Ok, i prefer it to be a relative thing to South Park :)
My bad.
added on the 2008-04-29 00:26:47 by iks iks
Or with the €100 you spend on an hard-drive you buy a nice enough gfx card to play all demos.
added on the 2008-04-29 01:05:51 by xernobyl xernobyl
BB Image
added on the 2008-04-29 04:18:04 by Gargaj Gargaj
1.9 Mbps might be enough for SD resolutions, but HD ... no way. For even half-way decent quality at 1080p/24, you already need something around 5 Mbps. Considering that 1080p/60 is what you *really* want, it's more like 10-12 Mbps. And then again, some demos don't compress all that well and may require bitrates much higher than that. Or they contain a few uber-critical scenes that make the peak bitrate go through the roof. (For example, I did not manage to coerce one scene of "masagin" into 40 Mbps @ 1080p/24.)
added on the 2008-04-29 09:29:50 by KeyJ KeyJ
Quote:
2. The need to browse for demos, select the desired settings, wait for them to load and finally watch them at low frame rates kills all the fun.

Err. What?

Demos are real-time.
added on the 2008-04-29 11:18:57 by gloom gloom
this kind of video compression (mpeg, h.26x) was intended for "natural images": flowers, trees, ball games, beer commercials and porn (which we all know is a category of imagery which should be banned). so hence it will always behave like shit on schematic / cartoon / geometric style animations. using 20 Mbps to encode a demo is nonsense, even if it gives the quality you want. most video codec weren't meant for this purpose. do it low quality or run the executable. damnit
added on the 2008-04-29 11:27:38 by earx earx
noo. not that discussion again...
added on the 2008-04-29 13:18:44 by raer raer
You must ask nicely to your computer.. in fwench.

HAY GUISE, thanks for your answers!

>rarefluid: you surely meant "Welcome to pouet BBS", didn't you? And thanks for the link, it is made of oldskool and win. Man, it's just perfect, thanks so much!
>Gargaj: I dunno lol
>KeyJ: Uhh by HD I meant the 1024x576 format of DTV's HD demos, not 1080i, since of 1080i I dare not even dream. Besides, most demos are limited to 1400x900, no? kkapturing a reasonable amount of demos into 1080i is a worthy undertaking, they could be shown on mainstream TV (think BBC); masses could be enlightened.

What I want now though is all the DTV's 1024x576 demos on my hard drive. Is there a way to automatically download them all?
added on the 2008-04-29 19:02:16 by s2rm s2rm
surely there is. just build your own crawler (I'd use curl and perl).

An easy way (not necessarily the one needing the least bandwidth) is to download all 13300 http://www.demoscene.tv/page.php?id=172&vsmaction=view_prod&id_prod=(number_here) pages and parse them :)
A smarter way is search for % and parse the 68 search result pages containing 1365 ids and fetch only those id pages. As an id page is ~40K and a search page is ~120K the first approach is ~500M and the second one is ~62M of metadata. I guess it is possible from the links to tell whether it is HD or normal, so you'd then just grab the links from the resulting htmls and download them.

There may be better ways, but since this was my first visit to dtv website today this was just the quickest ways I could find. On the other hand, if you wanna download 500 GB, I don't think you care about 62M of metadata...
added on the 2008-04-29 19:59:45 by mihi mihi
>mihi: Thanks so much for your answer!

Basically, it is even easier, as all the HD videos end in .mp4 and are located on http://mp4vod.demoscene.tv/. But alas, I am no coder; I was hoping that you could recommend me a ready-made crawler that would fit my purposes. I can't seem to find a good one.
added on the 2008-04-29 20:09:04 by s2rm s2rm
maybe wget with bucketloads of options will do the trick. like if you limit the recursion depth and specifically add .mp4 to the download list.

a better option is asking the DTV guys.
added on the 2008-04-29 20:49:02 by skrebbel skrebbel
Downloaded some demos from the wurstcaptures site and am disappointed. 320x240, 60FPS and ~4000KBPS??? facepalm.jpg
added on the 2008-04-29 21:42:50 by s2rm s2rm
try compressing demo videos yourself and you'll see what I meant by what I wrote earlier...
added on the 2008-04-29 21:45:30 by raer raer
Besides those demos probably ARE native 320x240 to begin with...
added on the 2008-04-29 21:46:54 by raer raer
Try compressing the tunnel-ish scene in theBeauty, at pretty much any H.264 bitrate. Laughter ensues.
It's just not worth it for a lot of demos.

Just wait a few more decades and there will be a DTV HuffYUV stream :P
added on the 2008-04-29 22:01:04 by nagato^ nagato^
nagato^ - Is that a CHALLENGE?! >:)
added on the 2008-04-29 22:05:26 by micksam7 micksam7
nagato^ - http://capped.tv/playeralt.php?vid=1209520301-1-0

h.264 is powerful enough to encode pretty much anything with a little love and a lot of time [10 minutes for every 1 minute of demo with my encoder settings ;p].

That cap is 3,074 k average bitrate, which may be a bit on the high side. The chaos of the tunnel makes it kinda hard to judge the quality though. [Average bitrate is fun, the dot tunnel gets 8,000kbits+ and slower scenes get 500kbits or less, things average out to 3,000k]

Back to the topic of this thread:
Might want to go to sites that support downloading the files. Like wurstcaptures and such. Could ask the DTV guys if they'll allow some option to download the files, see how that goes. Or capture them yourself! Would be interesting to see a proper HD project like this; mount a cheap PC with a video decoding accelerator on the back of a HD monitor, start 'er up and let things roll.

Side-note:
I might have to add HD support to Capped.TV sometime. :) [Although it sorta does support it if you upload a properly-encoded MP4, but it won't cross-encode to 1024x786 or anything -yet-]
added on the 2008-04-30 04:37:15 by micksam7 micksam7
>micksam7: your answer is appreciated!
I took the time to compare the three sites. Attached is exhibit 1, resized screenshots of the 4 different versions of Fairytale:
- the realtime demo with 6x fsaa itself
-1024x576, 25fps, 1900kbps DTV,
- 640x480, 25fps, 2097kbps capped.tv,
- 800x600, 60fps, 3200kbps wursstcaptures.
BB Image.
It seems to me that DTV is a clear winner here.

I would contact them, bu I have no idea how to do that: they won't reply to the message sent via "contact us", and there are no other options listed. No email, no IRC, no nothing. Anyone knows where to find these guys?
added on the 2008-04-30 17:23:01 by s2rm s2rm
I use 60fps, that's why I need the high bitrate. Fairytale is not the demo that benefits from that, but other demos might. 25fps imho is definitely not enugh for some fast-paced demos.

my version looks really bad though, I must confess... Maybe I should switch to 30fps...
added on the 2008-04-30 17:36:35 by raer raer

login