Feedback: Defcon Movie Channel

[kampf]

TV was awesome. How about working on a segue instead of just cutting off the clip and showing us black screen.

Also, more funny shorts are welcome. Show the movie hackers to. Definitely normalize the volume a bit.

Why would it cut off sometimes in the middle of videos?

DEFINTELY make the shorts you guys put up available for DL on the website. Some of that stuff was too funny.

I'm sure eco can explain why it goes black for a bit, something with mplayer and whatnot...

Hackers was the last movie of the con this year, on Sunday, at 4PM i think. Volume normalization was something we attempted to fix, and it did help the movies, but the videos still suffered.

eco can also explain the cutoffs in depth, but it has to do with the movies reporting innacurate durations to mplayer. mplayer would then play for x amount of time and go to the next one, even though it wasn't over.

We have a lot of clips, and not so much bandwidth. A list will likely be made available, so you can keep your eyes open for it on whatever networks you may have available.

[mmca]

Brought to you by dc801, including help by: eco, tierra, harm, kampf, dedhed, A, Grifter, com4, Adrenaline, ManicV and undoubtedly more...

Thanks guys, passed out to it every night... Sat night (or Sunday morning) when it was gone I had trouble sleeping :)

One question... was there a super duper long version of Dune playing? If so who can i contact to get a copy?

Cheers.

-M

[TheCotMan]

DCMC: Brought to you by dc801, including help by: eco, tierra, harm, kampf, dedhed, A, Grifter, com4, Adrenaline, ManicV and undoubtedly more...

Yep, DCMC came in clearer than any other channel at the AP for us. It worked really well, but I almost wanted to see the clips and filler more than the movies. :-D
(Movie were good, but I could tune in to the filler and watch it for a bit before heading back outside.0

I missed the showing of 23. Did it work? Were the subtitles chopped at all? Did the framing in letterbox allow it to all be on the screens for AP TV?

TIA

[Eugene Da Vinci]

Yep, DCMC came in clearer than any other channel at the AP for us. It worked really well, but I almost wanted to see the clips and filler more than the movies. :-D
(Movie were good, but I could tune in to the filler and watch it for a bit before heading back outside.0

I missed the showing of 23. Did it work? Were the subtitles chopped at all? Did the framing in letterbox allow it to all be on the screens for AP TV?

TIA

It did its job =) it was very convientiet to watch talks in my room in the morning.

[gzzah]

What's the name of short with the balloons that start attacked the stick children? I'd love to get a copy of it since I missed some of it.

Having the talks in the room was definately something that kept my interest in Defcon, unfortunately it also exacerbated anti-socialness since.. fuck.. Equillibrium is on and it's a stupid movie that I just have to watch!!! He cries at a RAINBOW and then the puppy goes YELP and oh my it's chaos in no-emotion-city!!! GUNKATA!!!

Excellent job. DCTV was, without a doubt, one of the best things to come along.

[viciouschiapet]

great job. the shorts were my favorite part, though i did end up spending too much time at con watching those damn movies instead of speakers or socializing. only sad thing was that fear and loathing was played at 3am, so i had to miss it.

[kampf]

Yep, DCMC came in clearer than any other channel at the AP for us. It worked really well, but I almost wanted to see the clips and filler more than the movies. :-D
(Movie were good, but I could tune in to the filler and watch it for a bit before heading back outside.0

I missed the showing of 23. Did it work? Were the subtitles chopped at all? Did the framing in letterbox allow it to all be on the screens for AP TV?

TIA

23 completely bombed. eco tried and tried to get it to work, but for some reason it just wouldn't play. We'll have to find a better rip so it can be shown next year.

[TheCotMan]

23 completely bombed. eco tried and tried to get it to work, but for some reason it just wouldn't play. We'll have to find a better rip so it can be shown next year.

Crap. That sucks. There were two copies on that DVD-R and both were ripped with mencoder (DIVX Encoded AVI) and the one with the subs was test-played with mplayer (built from source) and windows media player.

If you find out what was wrong, I'd like to pass it to the person who did the encoding.

(IT was tested on the latest mplayer built from source with all of the video codecs/libs included like QT, MS Video, Real, divx, etc)

[dedhed]

great job. the shorts were my favorite part, though i did end up spending too much time at con watching those damn movies instead of speakers or socializing. only sad thing was that fear and loathing was played at 3am, so i had to miss it.

I figured anybody who wanted to watch Fear and Loathing would still be going strong at 3am. That or bombed out of their mind on the couch, in a perfect mental state to enjoy it.

[dedhed]

I'm just going to answer everything I remember in one solid strafing run.

Creating a guide for the movie channel including all of the filler material would be difficult, because it's randomly selected between movies. In order to create a guide, we would have to hard-code the playlist for every item. Very time consuming for 74 hours of programming.

Getting a list of filenames of every item that played would probably be trivial, but providing access to them on our server would be prohibitive. If someone wants to make a multi-hundred dollar donation to pay for our bandwidth costs, I'm sure we could work something out.

Kampf is correct, most periods of blackout on the screen were caused by clips incorrectly reporting their length to mplayer.

The little black and white DC clips with the witty sayings were the work of our own Manic Velocity, if I remember correctly, so feel free to congratulate him at any time.

I believe the version of Dune we played was the standard version, because we didn't have quick access to the Director's cut.

Normalization across all clips would be the win. We will look into solutions for this for next year, as clipping and distortion of the audio was a bit of a problem the first day.

Next year I will also see what I can do to ensure the DCMC is available on all TVs, since channel 21 was apparently a bust for a lot of people.

[Tierra]

Actually, I was under the impression we selected that version of Dune on purpose for the reason that we couldn't fit the Director's Cut version in the time slot available.

I still haven't heard from eco since I got back from DC, but as soon as I do, I'll get him the box back so he can rip off the list of all the filler we used.

As for me, I will be enjoying a copy of every last clip that was on the box, including the stuff that didn't play, on my 250gb drive eco already has. If there's a number of popular clips people want, I do have a way of posting those clips for download for a short period of time.

[hackajar]

Channel 21 was not initally on our living room TV. A quick call to front desk, and engineering came out with the romonster and added it to our "vaild" list of channels. That's all that had to be done to fix that problem.

Maybe a poll of more "Movies or Clips" should be put up. IMHO why would you drive/fly 500+ miles to the desert to watch a movie you can "get" at home? Maybe if the movie was extreamly hard to find. Clips really made DCTV for me last year, and I was sad to see a lot of the same clips between movies were used this year. You can only watch the same cat get malled so many times in one day. As a side bar, our entire room of people stopped what they were doing for the clips, then went on about their business when a movie came on.

[gzzah]

Bittorrent the shorts!

[Tierra]

What's funny about this is that the clips were only put in there in the first place to keep people entertained with something between movies (hence the name "filler"). We didn't have any other ideas of what to put in there, and we aren't quite ready to start feeding it live video (like news feeds) just yet, and don't have the hardware to do it either. That was another idea in mind though, and may be good for next year or a couple years down the road.

The channel was setup as a "Movie Channel" before anything else though, and the whole main idea was to play movies for everyone to chill and watch after a long day.

[kampf]

The first year was just to see if we could do it better than a dvd player that was ignored. Despite the problems, it was a success. This year we wanted to try linux and a good scheduling system, which worked really well.

We've already got some good ideas for next year, so do not fear. More obscure and relevant stuff, some documentaries, more of what you keep asking for. Some filler, like a few of the movies, will likely be around for a looooong time because they rock.

Expect good things.