Everything YouTube

[Maj]

Alright i guess i'm doing the u2b thing now. It's frustrating as fuck though. They sent me an invite to join their partnership program, then sent me another email saying:

We have disabled revenue sharing on this video for one of the following reasons:

- You have not provided adequate documentation that you have the necessary rights to commercially use all the video material and music

- Advertisers on YouTube are currently looking to advertise against family safe content

While i try to contact them to figure out what the hell went wrong, i have a question. What's the best codec to use for files to be uploaded to u2b? Windows Media Encoder is the most convenient method for me, but somehow all those videos come out looking blurry. Maybe google is conspiring against microsoft?

[Magnetro]

H264@5000kb/s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOTnVXnpbtc

1280x720

[Maj]

Dang, nice. Obviously i can't reach 1280x720 without faking it but maybe the codec will help because WMV is not cutting it at all. (Or maybe i should try a higher bitrate first.) What encoder do you use? Dealing with H.264 is not fun at all.

Also you misspelled Rogue. Want me to buy you some X-Men comics?

[error1]

H264 is really the way to go, I use a program called MeGUI witch automates a lot of the x264 encoding process but you still have to write an AviSynth script ( although it can help with that ).

Looking to advertise against family safe content? Does that mean you need to add some boobs and swear words. What part of hitting people repeatedly is family safe.

edit: I didn't notice this before but I had a fallout 3 vid with an old Cole Porter song playing on the ingame radio and they added the download this song add rather then remove it. It looks like you can get away with copyrighted music so long as it's on itunes or something.

[Xenozip.]

Also you misspelled Rogue. Want me to buy you some X-Men comics?

Misspelling != typo :p

[Maj]

Okay, i've already used MeGUI to encode my Evo2k9 Ryu vid but it was kind of a hassle. I'll go back to it though. What settings do you guys use? Cuz a lot of people were saying that u2b didn't like my settings, and the vid was coming out at like double length playing at half speed.

That soundtrack thing confuses me too, because i just saw this CvS1 video which obviously isn't audioswapped but it has the digital download ad. Do you make money from that or is it u2b's version of a protection racket?

[Magnetro]

Yeah, misspelling isn't a t;ypo

Anyway, I took the video down and I'll re-upload it soon.

I use VirtualDub to encode in h264. I use FFDSHOW > H264. It's really easy/simple.

[error1]

I'm definitely not an encoding expert but I find 2pass insane or qt with a bit rate 1000-3000, and a lame mp3 in an mkv works well for youtube. I've had some problems with u2b with mp4 audio but have never had any problems uploading mkvs.

[Xenozip.]

H264@5000kb/s

1280x720

So I see :V

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USE-vnFOFDY

Gracias

[Magnetro]

Maj, I can send you the VCF I use to upscale stuff in VirtualDub. Your clips are 4:3 S-Video unlike Xenozip's anime videos, so they'll have a pretty large border. You can always write stuff into the borders like "VISIT SONIC HURRICANE.COM OR ELSE."

[Xenozip.]

My videos are whatever I capture on my computer. So I guess MvC2 anime now.. ohwait(!)

But seriously that game is pretty anime, lol. I should do a HD VSav slideshow just to spite that entirely accurate and appropriate comment though.

When I upscaled videos in the past I used virtualdub filters for sharpening and unsharp mask, etc. I got it down to a fine science back when youtube started supporting flv files and I was going crazy with the vid quality for aosx/bbb because I had to resize for those specific dimensions in order to avoid recompression. A little sharpening goes a long way.

[Magnetro]

Might be good if maj and i look into the sharpening filters.

[Xenozip.]

I think it can marginally improve any resized video. Some antialiasing/smoothing is good in some cases, but massive resizes can get to the point where objects become very obviously blurry or "smudged", etc.

The nice thing about the filters I use though is they let you see the preview-result so you can tinker with the settings ad nauseam.

So when it's not really necessary you may only apply very little, or none at all. Other times it can make a huge difference to add more.

[Maj]

Dudes it's youtube, i don't fucking care how it looks. For every one positive i notice or experience on u2b, ten things piss me off. If i can improve picture quality in one steps or less, i'll do it. Otherwise i'm over it like something really fast with mad hops gets over something really slow and short.

So here's the plan. I'm gonna give WME one more shot, except i'm gonna crank up the bitrate to eleven! When that inevitably fails, i'ma use MeGUI so error1 and i can gloat over how we're way more tech-savvy than Magnetro (until he installs unix and compiles his own encoder).

Sound good?

Go Lakers!

[Maj]

What exactly qualifies as 5 stars? I've had videos at 4.5 Average Rating and they've been marked as 4 1/2 stars, which actually shows up as 4 stars some places. Desora's recent CvS2 vid has an Average Rating of exactly 4.75 yet it still registers as 4 1/2 stars. Has anyone come across a 4.76 video?

[Xenozip.]

Yes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHoDA9P9bew
4.76 = 5*

I think I've said this before but I normally disable ratings (and sometimes comments) for three very good reasons.
1) Stars aren't good critique. If something gets a bunch of 1stars they don't tell me shit about what was wrong with the vid.
2) Even if they were critique, the average/majority of u2be populace is retarded and I really don't want to hear crit from these people.
3) Stars basically just show popularity/popular-opinion, which viewcount does for me already, so what good are stars.

If people aaaaactually have some sort of opinion I rather they comment than +* or +<3 but naturally the comments I do get are, of course, retarded or meaningless. Therefor so are the *s and <3s as well. I have to critique it myself in the end which I could have done without the stupid stars.

If I could disable the stars on Pixiv, I would. I put up artwork and most people who bother rating will rate it as 10*s, which is obviously bullshit because the stuff I make is definitely not 10-out-of-10 material all the time, some are better/worse than others. Then some random asshole comes along and 1*'s something and I'm like fffff. Wow so you did't like it, thanks for being a prick and leaving a 1* that tells me absolutely nothing at all other than some random nameless/faceless dude didn't like it. Thanks star system you're a blast.

I've conducted an experiment and left open ended questions in the video description before. It was indeed barking up the wrong tree. There's a high number of people who don't even read the description (sometimes myself included) and the ones that did and responded to my questions.. well.. made me regret asking.

On a side note, video responses are by approval only on all my vids and I am eternally glad that I adopted that policy from the start.

[error1]

There are some videos on u2b with very high views but have a very low popular-opinion. I normally avoid videos with 1 or 2 stars or with no rating when browsing u2b. Stars and pointless comments don't bother me at all. I swear tho on my fallout 3 run I keep getting the same question asked over and over. "why do you load the game?" still I don't mind answering.

[Xenozip.]

Stars don't really bug me on u2be I just think they are worthless so I disable them, hoping that people will actually respond with more than a click of a button on an entirely arbitrary rating system.

Questions like that don't bother me, but see I post IaMP and SWR videos sometimes so retarded touhou fanboys from 4chan take it upon themselves to leave stupid comments like:

summersleeps (11 months ago) Show Hide
so many funny sexual thoughts when i watch this...ha ha ha.

which get responses like

tacobellassasin (11 months ago) Show Hide
wow u guys are nerds...this is the most action u got in years...stop jacking off to this

And then other touhou fanboys post crap like:

Archimonde259 (1 month ago) Show Hide
Tis is not Flandre Scarlet full power.
This is Flandre Scarlet 1% of her full power.
Normal Flandre is 0.5% of it.
Full Power Flan blows you up before the battle's even begun.

And it's not just the touhou-related vids that attract flies.

turnbacktime (1 week ago) Show Hide
alpha2 was a much better game.

^ On my SFA3 Sakura V-ism vid. Thanks for unnecessary trolling buddy.

KanameTousen (1 day ago) Show Hide
Gulie's a family man and about 40 in the next in the timeline remy has got toake over

^ Hi SF4.

And let's not forget the ever-present question "is this mugen?", to which I can only facepalm.

Unfortunately the most intelligible comments I get are questions that have been answered over 100 times in faqs/srk forums, and "what song was that?".

[Maj]

Like i told Magnetro a while ago, i think it's a mistake to disable ratings, comments, or anything else of the sort. I've only disabled ratings it for one video, which is on my account strictly for archival purposes and i don't actually want people watching it.

I'm 99% positive that ratings (both quantity and quality) and comments dramatically affect search rankings. Yes, most of them are worthless but it helps you to have them and hurts you if you shut them down.

Also, Capcom Fighting Evolution clips generate the most Mugen questions of any game ever. Even more than some Mugen games.

[Xenozip.]

Regarding the archive thing, you can make it a private video that only your friends are able to view. But IIRC if you add friends to the viewing list it automatically sends them a message and link about it, which is kind of annoying. But if you don't actually want people seeing it you can just make the video private.

I don't really care about search results. The only videos I care about are my SFA3 ones, which have ratings enabled, but are also cataloged in an SRK thread for easy viewing and discussion anyway.

But two of my most viewed videos (at 9k and 6k respectively) have ratings disabled, and I have a couple of 4k view ones with both comments and ratings disabled. I don't know how the searches work though, but to me it isn't a big deal. I don't really care about volume/traffic from random searches. But the related-videos mechanics is pretty stupid sometimes, that's for sure.

U2be is public-viewing by nature but I would be just fine with having only SRK members and SH/F members being able to even look at my videos.

[Maj]

Oh i don't want to make it private. I meant i want people to be able to watch it if they're looking for it, but i want to give it the least amount of exposure possible. Plus i know it's a bad video and said as much in the description box, so i don't really want to look at people's ratings either. In fact i think a 5-star rating would annoy me more than a 1-star rating.

Speaking of which, i pretty much only give out 5-star ratings. If something i like has a low rating, then i just look at it as balancing out the ignorance of popular opinion. Like you said, it's not an objective/accurate critique anyway so if i can help a good video get some more views i think it's worthwhile. If you search anything whatsoever, there are always three or four results on the first page which don't belong there at all.

I mean, what are we supposed to do? Give great videos 4 stars because they're not instant classics, while some dumb video of Zangief trying to get through a Mario stage gets thousands of automatic 5-star ratings? It's not even worth hesitating. In actuality it's not an evaluation system - it's simply a promotion system.

[Xenozip.]

Well my thing is, if some one types in "iamp" into a search I really don't want the first few results to be random match videos from three years ago, which is exactly what you get for the second result. The third result being a joke video (literally, the description is "This is a joke. ") and the first result being a really bad/old combo video.

However, that match video has 13 votes and 10k views. There is tournament footage with waaaay more votes and views, so why is that shitty old one even there. The players aren't good, they are using tactics older than 3 years, and it's a poor representation of the game, certainly not a good representation of the way the game is played today since it has evolved a lot in the past year. The video isn't special in any way other than it's old and bad.

It makes me think votes and views don't really matter (look down the list, tournament footage with higher views/votes).

Do I actually care though? Nope. If players are casual interests then whatever, they aren't going to play the game regardless what the first video they see is. You know even the people from SRK and SH/F aren't going to suddenly play IaMP either despite being fighting game players, it would take nothing short of me physically handing you the disc and/or installing it for you to get you to play it, and it would be a miracle if you lasted a week.

But if they were already more than just casual interest then they are going to have sense enough to view more than just the first couple videos in the list. They are going to click on at least a few videos.

[Maj]

Well, obviously search engine algorhythms are complex and based on multiple factors. Otherwise search engine optimization wouldn't be a career field. But when was the last time you saw a video with disabled ratings on the first page of any search?

People searching for "iamp" might not be a major concern to you, but those searching for specific inquiries like "iamp tutorial" or "sfa3 karin vc" are the ones you need to reach. They're essentially looking for your video whether or not they know it, but they're only gonna look at three or four vids before they think it's a lost cause or get bored.

The way i look at it, SRK and all these other places are a good launchpad to get your video early views and ratings, but after a while that traffic drops off dramatically because those threads get old or those posts end up three pages back where nobody reads them anymore. At that point u2b search results become your primary source of new views. If you can't make it into the first two or three pages of search results by that point, then your video is kind of stranded in limbo. High ratings help you accomplish that task.

[Xenozip.]

The video had 13 ratings and 10k views while an entirely more relevant and up-to-date match vid with 132 ratings and 120k views isn't even on the first six pages (I got bored looking at the list after the first six pages, and yeah the word iamp appears in the title, description, and tags for said 132 ratings vid). We are talking ten times the number of ratings and it's average rating is 4.90 while the shitty one is 4.85.

Like I said though, casual interest != real interest. People searching "iamp" is no more a concern of mine than "iamp tutorial" or any other iamp-related search. Nor is "sfa3" or "sfa3 vc".

See, for me it's not about popularity or exposure. For me it's about sharing an experience with the rest of the already established community. I don't know how many people I've tried to get to play fighters and how many go on to stick around, but I'm done with that. We (in the mizuumi and team-spooky crew) have been working really hard to get people to play games like iamp, melty blood, akatsuki, etc for a very long time. The conclusion that I've come to is players are going to play if they want to and it's just that simple. A match video isn't going to do it, a tutorial isn't going to do it, a combo video isn't going to do it, a wiki isn't, a blog isn't, a tournament isn't, even straight up asking them to play isn't going to do it either. And if some one happens to give it a try, beating the shit out of them or sandbagging them doesn't really make a bit of difference. Either way they will either rage and want to keep playing because they love competition (like me and most fighting game players), or ragequit. We've seen it many, many, many, many times and it's been maaaaany years. I'm not just talking about IaMP either, the western fighting game community all but shit on meltyblood and arcana heart and guilty gear for the longest time and older games like SFA3/VSav/Jojo's get next to no love outside of Japan, it's amazing guilty gear gets any love at all, but because it's at SBO/Evo suddenly people care (surprise surprise).

Bellreisa has dumped so much time and money into IaMP and frankly it's amazing there is any community for it outside of Japan, the size of said community floats somewhere around 60-100 people (about half of which are actually active). Yet you can't even get that much with just any game, as we learned from Akatsuki which he tried to promote interest in. Which goes to show how strong touhou fanboyism is. Melty Blood is just now starting to get some attention after allllll these years and it's mostly due to MB:AA's arcade and console port release combined with MB:AC's pc+netplay availability. Does Melty Blood really deserve to be widely ignored? I stopped asking myself that!

I just no longer try to bring people into fighters, and I use to try to educate people but I've stopped that too, right now I just play what I feel like playing and relate my experiences to other gamers however I feel like sharing it at the time (vid, blog, forum, whatever). So no I couldn't care less where my videos are in the search. If you are a part of the community it isn't incredibly difficult to bump into my u2be page or blog (which links to my u2be page and visa versa).

[Maj]

That's cool with me. I mean it doesn't really affect me; i'm just sharing my observations. Like i said, google's search metrics are complicated. You've seen all the random crap they monitor. Maybe recent videos get more priority. Maybe it matters which geographical region the views are coming from. Maybe ratings/views or favorites/views ratios are important. Maybe they actually monitor the percentage of times people click on your video when it comes up in search results. Hell, maybe filesize is an issue since i'm sure they're not naive enough to ignore bandwidth considerations. But i guarantee you that ratings are a factor.

If those people don't matter to you then that's that and that's fine by me. I feel bad for you guys but honestly that's just the way it is around here. People don't go to SRK to find new fighting games to play. They go there to learn more about the fighting game they already do play. You can convince them that MvC2 is better than MvC1, but that's about as far as it goes. Maybe you'd have better luck recruiting people on a mainstream forum like NeoGAF or IGN. It's a misconception that SRK generates interest in fighting games. New blood comes from the outside. SRK only maintains interest in established games.

Getting people to DO stuff has always been notoriously difficult in any gaming community, especially online. I mean i'm influential enough to where i can consistently get a few thousand people to watch something, but you gotta have an audience base in the hundreds of thousands (like Penny-Arcade) to get a couple hundred people to do something or buy something.

[Xenozip.]

Umm I don't think influence has much to do with it. You being you, prolly could easily get a few thousand views, and so could I or a lot of people here if the content had any substance worth linking around the 'net. Because that's what gets views, links. And that's what gets links, content worth linking. But could you get that many views on a random match video that was ordinary casuals that was not worth linking to anyone? I know you could pump up the views by your own hand but good luck getting 6k+ views which one of my completely random mundane obsolete scrubby match vids (that wasn't even me playing) got simply because it was linked somewhere in Japan for some mysterious unknown reason (thanks japan, sighhh). Where as, otherwise that video prolly would have only got maybe 300 at best.

Come to think of it I'm surprised you ask as specific of a question as the star rating being > 4.75 = ? -- I wonder how much research you've put into this considering you were against u2be for a long time. Have you plugged in CvS2, MvC2, SFA2, SFA3, ST, SF4, SFIV, SF3, SFIII, and 3S into the search? Daigo? Wong? Valle? Evo? SBO?

I'm just asking because I have not. I only took the time to find out the answer regarding 5*s for you because I had the time, but now I'm curious about what your thoughts regarding all this are because I haven't looked into it at all.

[Maj]

Nah, i haven't put any time into it. Wouldn't have brought up the rating threshold if it wasn't for that perfect 4.75 showing up on desora's video, which i happened to be posting about at the time.

If i cared enough to do that kind of research, it wouldn't be through trial and error. SEO is a big deal in the marketing world. I bet there are thousands of articles about youtube's search engine alone.

[Maj]

Hm, u2b sent me another partnership invite, this time for my CvS2 Nimuro combovid which only has a thousand views. I can't imagine that thing ever becoming popular. Anyway i did a little more digging and found this:

If you applied for partnership through http://www.youtube.com/partners and your application was approved, you may rev share all of the videos in your YouTube account. However, please note that if one of your submitted videos does not to meet the program criteria, then it may be rejected for revenue sharing and from the site.

However, if you were invited to enable revenue share on one of your videos, you may only enter this video into revenue share. If you would like to enable more of your videos for revenue share, please submit an application for extended partnership at http://www.youtube.com/partners.

So even if they approve one of these individual video invites/applications, it won't give you the same benefits as full partnership status. Though i'm sure having a few of those videos on your account will help you get accepted if you do decide to apply.

In any case i think i'll pass on this one. Maybe i'll apply for partnership when i release the next SF4 TACV. Here's more info about the single-video monetization program if anyone's interested.

The only thing i'm curious about is what it takes to make money off these things. Because if we're talking hundreds of thousands of views per week, that's probably out of reach for the kind of content we're producing and will definitely be out of reach once the tourist portion of the SF4 crowd goes back to Halo/Madden.

[Xenozip.]

Hehe, I made a list of all the music I've used for my youtube videos and a playlist containing the videos that have music, lol.

[Maj]

Going by what i've seen happen with my last few vids, i guess the first thing to get updated is view count - either on the video page or elsewhere. Sometimes the video page number will be more up to date, and other times the channel/search number will be more up to date. It alternates.

Then the incoming links get updated, usually hours after the view count. Then the map gets updated way after. That's what was throwing us off about the Ryu TACV because i knew 13k hits were coming from livedoor.jp but Japan was blank on the map. It turned dark green the following day though.

On a completely unrelated note, i noticed a weird artifact at 0:10 in that vid and it's creeping me out. Right after Ryu and Ken's feet fade out, but before the first combo clip fades in, the left middle part of the screen flickers white. If you manage to pause it, you'll notice that it's actually the background scenery which fades in after the Ryu/Ken kick in the intro.

Except ... that shit isn't in the video i uploaded. I've rewatched it ten times and it fades to black smoothly in the original. Halloween youtube mystery?