pouët.net

There seems to be some momentum towards always providing video captures of your latest demos. How do you people feel about this?

Means less work for me.

Yeah and platforms I don't have it's also very nice.

In an age where everyone has different hardware config's it really should be standard.

It's nice that people bother to do them, as that mean I can watch demos I like at the office or when travelling with my laptop.

As for people *demanding* video captures I'd like to quote mayor Quimby:
"Demand? Who are you to demand anything? I run this town, you're just a bunch of nobodies!".

video captures are nice, I can count on my fingers* the demos I watched realtime in the last year (excluding parties)

[*that is, using the unary system, not the binary]

The more video captures were on the rise, the less demos I watched.

I'm happy that people bother and I can watch demos on my living room iMac without resorting to dual boot or emulation fuckery.

very handy but ironic. what's the point of real-time if all we watch is the vid cap ?

Yeah I also think it's a little ironic.

It's a great way to watch cross platform things, I don't quite trust emulators :-)

It's also apparent that half the PC-demos released won't work on half the PC's out there, and as I'm not using Windows it would be nice if video was more or less mandatory for those as well.

As long as the original binaries are still available, I do not see any issue with that.

as long as people are not really taking anything out of the 'real-time' concept and demos are just real-time calculated animations, it doesnt really matter if you watch them on video or not. my machine is so old now that i dont even have a choice with the newest material.

what i'd like to see more is lossless fullhd vid caps.

2nd'd.

to be honest, the word "sacharine" comes to mind.

what nosfe said.

what nosfe said.

I don't really like it but it's the cheapest way I have to watch the newest prods.

see the problem i have with video versions is people taking them for granted - from both sides of the coin:
- the audience will stick to watching videos, which kinda ruins the whole realtime concept - and i just couldnt help laughing when Winden asked me to mirror the video files for Elevated to scene.org because the 200MB AVI version for a 4K intro was generating too much traffic.
- the coders, on the other hand, will (and perhaps already) feel less motivated to do code that runs on a large variety of machines (or at least fails gracefully) because "you can always watch the video version", even if it would be a one line fix.

personally, i'm becoming a fan of youtube-ing demos because at least the (lack of) quality will consistently remind you that you're watching an inferior version.

especially c64-video caps are really for the lazy bums.
how difficult is it to drop the disk-image in the emulator window?!

that said, i'm really a fan of demo-dvds, because they are perfect to show off demos to people that don't know em yet

I watch everything I can at least in an emulator (C64, DOS demos) if I can't watch it on the real thing (PC, GBA). Watching videos is ok as long as you keep the context in mind (RAM, CPU, filesize, accelerated/not, production year, techniques, etc.).
Videos are are also a good thing for the future when all that shit won't run on our machines anymore... :) Thus lossless videos are a thing I really should consider when doing my captures. Seems like I have to buy another harddisk... ;)

I would it like more if the authors of a demo also do the capture, because 3rd party captures sometimes have graphical glitches or sound issues. On D.TV you will find some captures with these issues.

Sometimes people judge a demo wrongly just because it was not rendered right on their machine. A capture from the demo makers could prevent this.

And BTW: Some of the very old demos not using a software renderer are not rendered right anymore on modern GFX cards/drivers. So a video is in some cases the only way to watch an old demo how it supposed to be rendered.

i second gargaj on that but i'm always downloading the demos i would like to watch. dunno it just doesn't feel the same when its just a plain video. watching videos is not much of a difference in composing them in after effects or whatsoever might be the content creation tool. sure we have all the rules that apply to call something a demo or 64k but i'm not sure if the pc demoscene as a platform would evolve like it happened with the c64 or amiga stuff. doing video captures to show demos and intros to people on youtube (which normally don't belong to the sort of audience that downloads creations and runs them in realtime) is a good thing to spread digital art.

and yes i don't really feel like spending a couple of weeks in creating something that is just played back as a youtube video :x (showing stuff to non demoscene people always ends up in "can't we just download the video???")

using mac os most of the time lately i would really appreciate it if more stuff would be ported to different platforms. i mean wasn't the whole idea about doing stuff in realtime, playing it back in realtime? :)

rare: what you said about keeping the context, i'm afraid this will slightly vanish over time if videos become more and more popular. and stuff that doesn't run anymore on current platforms because of getting too old has always produced enough emulators that run it very well.

whatever :)